


Papa Don't Preach

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Crack, F/M, Family Drama, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Kylo Ren and Armitage Hux are in-laws, Mama-kitten Rey, Papa-bear Kylo Ren, Possessive Kylo Ren, Protective Kylo Ren, Rey saves the day, Romance, Secret Marriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-08-26 10:42:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16680106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: With the homecoming of his third daughter at hand, Kylo Ren is swimming in sugar plum fantasies of domestic bliss.Until he finds out someone is crashing the family portrait this year: a clandestine son-in-law who is none other than Armitage Bastille Hux, the *fourth*.Can the last little Jedi convince her Sith Lord to forever hold his peace? Or is it "death do we part" for these two crazy kids?"Papa Don't Preach is a poignant affirmation of the bond between father and daughter, ties of romantic love, and how life weaves them together into a tapestry we call Family."-Pastel's Mom





	1. Oh Daddy Dear, You Know You're Still Number One. But Girls, They Wanna Have Fun.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClaireLou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaireLou/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Violent Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14266785) by [PastelWonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder). 



“Shit, wait- my dress is caught.”

Kylo paused and turned, taking his beloved by her waist as she worked her heel out from the moist earth.

Dawn was still several hours away, night arching deep and star-studded above them to press its indigo lips to the silvering horizon. The new terraformed atmosphere on Mustafar was almost a hundred degrees cooler than before. Blue-hued meadows dappled by trees with weeping branches covered in night flowers blanketed the once-molten landscape. The cool air was thick with the sickly scent of the flowers, petals glimmering with the same dew that made the soft grass bow like a billion sycophants beneath their feet. It drenched the train of his wife’s long gown, trailing sparkling like the silver scales of a snake’s tail toward their castle.

“Damn... slippers... I don’t know why...” She trusted him to catch her as she struggled in the wet grass.

The winking twinkle of her bodice, cupped lovingly around her breasts, caught his attention.

Holding her captive in one hand, he palmed her in the other and bowed to steal a kiss from her lips.

“Kylo!” she scolded sharply, balking out of reach as she tried to wriggle from his grip without tripping on her train.

His scar twitched with a smirk. “What?”

“They’ll be here any minute…” she pushed at his hand.

He felt the fingertips of her other creeping around his shoulder to brush his neck.

“So?” he pressed her closure, savoring her beauty by the moonlight.

Where it hovered over the stillness of his home world, the Darkness sighed.

“So-o,” she huffed, still struggling enticingly, like a mewling in its first mate. His smile spread as he watched. “The children… all say that we’re too-”

He cut her off with a kiss, because he could. Because he wanted to.

Because he needed to.

She went sweetly still in his arms, except for the slight tip of her chin that let his tongue slid all the way back to her throat. She suckled him, mewing softly, her little hands kneading at his chest. He heard her ask, in her sounds and in her body, and threaded his thick fingers through her long, elegant hair to kiss her more.

“In love,” she breathed, when their lips finally parted. Her breasts rose and fell with her gentle panting as her eyes traveled slowly from his mouth to where he stared into her longingly.

_Always longing…_

“They say we’re too in love,” she whispered.

“Are we?” he murmured back. His gloved thumb brushed her cheek.

She tried to snort, but it came out as a breathless, needy sound. “Please. I don't even like you.”

“Ah. I see.” He dipped again, and this time she closed her eyes and parted her lips.

Suddenly, a sound like metal grinding to a stop hit the atmosphere. Lights much closer than the moon above beamed down on them, illuminating the grass in an eerie grey cast that seared his eyes.

He shielded them with his hand as his wife, now frenetic with excitement, forgot completely about their moment. She hopped inside her slippers and tugged his sleeve like a child as she chirped, “Kylo she’s here! She’s here! Oh, she’s finally here!”

A kind of catch, wound tight inside Ren’s heart, released as he felt his daughter’s Force signature wash over him.

At last, after three long years of campaigns across the galaxies, his fiercest little dark had come home.

 _How sweet,_ the Dark smiled with sardonic tenderness, _Our darkling brings Us a gift…_

“Gift?”

He didn’t have time to wonder. His wife had already torn off her shoes and balled her gown in her hands and was now sprinting to meet their daughter.

Wind whipped off the surface from the massive turbines of her imperial lightcraft, creating waves across the plain as the ship set down.

Its steel maw lowered, and from the depths of its bright throat, a black silhouette emerged.

“Discord!” Kylo heard his wife’s wild shrieks over the roar of the engines. “Discord! Discord!”

A striking young woman, dark-haired and tall, with her father’s sharp sneer and lightless eyes and her mother’s figure, sauntered down the ramp to meet her.

Her leg locked back to brace herself as her mother launched them into an embrace, already sobbing as the two women spun together and she dragged her taller daughter down to cover her face in kisses.

“My baby,” Discord allowed her mother to press their foreheads together and stroke her hair and shoulders, basking in the sight of her daughter as she wept, “My baby, oh Darkness my sweet baby, thank you, thank you for my baby-”

“Mama,” she chided lightly, a small smirk pulling up one corner of her long, full mouth. She took her mother’s face between her hands. “I’m fine.”

Though her tone was cavalier, Ren could see the wetness in her lashes as she kissed her mother’s forehead. “You’re such a worrier.”

“She’s your mother,” Ren reminded her quietly from behind his wife.

His daughter tipped back to look into the face of her sire. “Papa.”

“Hello, sweet dark,” his voice was soft and thick with emotion. “I missed you. So much.”

Her façade wavered, then cracked. Around her mother, she reached for him.

He drew both his little girls into the wide, cold span of his embrace.

_Together._

Over Rey’s shoulder, Discord rose onto the balls of her feet and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek.

“I’m so happy to be home,” she whispered. Her mouth trembled.

He reached up and tenderly wiped the tears that dripped like diamonds from her lashes. His black heart swelled against his ribs.

For the first time in three long years, all of his children would be together. Visions of them gathered around the table again, laughing and squabbling, this time with his grandchildren on his lap, eating with their tiny fingers from his plate, swam before his eyes.

_Perfection._

The Darkness smirked above him.

A shift in the light from her ship caught his eye.

He looked up into the mouth of the ramp, where a figure stood tall and broad against the bright. He recognized the outline immediately, if not for the man it belonged to, then for the one who had sired him.

Admiral Armitage Bastille Hux. The fourth.

Something ancient and feral unfurled under Ren’s skin as the boy started at a marshalled clip to meet them. It wasn’t exactly the look on the Admiral’s face; he wore the same expression he always did, which was to say none at all. His stoicism was even more intense than his father’s, his jaw squarer and tighter, the tilt of his chin, if believable, more haughty.

He had been the natural choice to accompany Discord on her campaigns when she came of-age. It was her birthright, as the fruit of Ren's Darkness, for his daughter to her test strength against the universe. The cruelest and most savage of his six children, she carried her father’s immense lust for violent conquest, coupled with her mother’s untameable heart. Hers was the cold-burning fire that would mount the galaxies, he was sure, and the Admiral had worked tirelessly to prove himself a worthy answer to Ren’s long-sought question: who would be her Captain Phasma. The cool, calculated eye at the center of her cyclone. The doggedly loyal one.

Time and time again, as Discord accompanied Ren on his long campaigns, the Admiral had proven himself a competent commander and her devoted servant, following her tirelessly through battle, fighting rabidly by her side, heedless to his own safety for the sake of his Majesty’s. His highborn, unyielding demeanor made it impossible for Discord to bully him, while his desire for greater territories and professional fame drove him to pursue her conquests with the same veracity she showed in her passion for destruction. He had demonstrated an unparalleled ability to manage her moods, stalwart and unmoved in the face of her wrath.

And he was a _legendary_ straightlace.

The perfect companion for Ren’s vicious little darkling.

Yet on seeing him, standing there behind his daughter, shoulders set back, his cool blue eyes meeting his over the heads of his beloveds, Ren felt a sinister shift within his gut.

Something was gravely wrong.

His Darkness began to gather slowly around him, creeping softly along the grass, animate and crackling with the whisper of destruction.

_He has taken something from me. What is it?_

_What?_

“Papa-” Discord was speaking to him. Her voice sounded strange. Unfamiliar.

It took him a heartbeat to comprehend why.

_Guilt._

“Papa, please, just listen-”

“Discord?” swaddled between her Siths, Rey’s words seemed to drift up to him from a dream.

His heart was pounding in his ears.

In slow motion, he saw his daughter slip out of his arms and step back. He saw the Admiral move, a stone gargoyle come to life, to place his hand against her lower back.

_No-_

Discord’s hand, that had held Ren's sword and crowned him with flowers, reaching upwards to cover the Admiral's heart. Exactly the way her mother’s would cover-

_No._

On her married finger, like the cutting edge of a blade, a diamond glinted beneath the moonlight.

“Oh… you two... are you… oh,” said Rey, her hand going to her breast when she saw the ring. “That’s… uh… oh. Kylo?”

She turned in his arms.

Both of his women were looking up at their patriarch with expectant, anxious expressions. Rey’s hands wrung nervously against his chest. Discord’s teeth mangled her lower lip, she clenched and unclenched her fists.

But Ren wasn’t looking at either of them. He was staring into the eyes of the charlatan, Armitage Bastille Hux. The fourth.

And fucking _last,_ Ren swore to himself.

Lightening lashed out of the sky and struck the grass behind him.

He shook his head once, twice.

A third time.

“No.”


	2. Like Cardiac Arrest, High Voltage When We Kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it appears Pastel is up to her usual fuckery - ruining your expectations with the her jumpcut-flashback savagery. Surprise, surprise...
> 
> Claire-baby, I am so deeply sorry.

Two years ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

 

 

 

They were losing the war.

Admiral Armitage Hux stood on the command bridge, watching the latest aerial assault on the Nemecs with his nose slightly tilted, lapel held in his gloved hand.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

One click to the right, another one of their imperial Fighters took a direct hit from a Nemecian ground launcher. Shrapnel scattered through their fleet as the percussions rattled the bridge’s view shield.

Beside him, his charge braced her hands on the control console and snarled.

For her maiden voyage, Discord Ren had led her father’s seventy-fifth fleet to Andromeda Nine, a galaxy well beyond the Universal Commonwealth. Rich in natural resources, the cluster was a coveted asset; it would serve as the next base for the Commonwealth’s expansion beyond its western bounds. Discord set out determined to secure Andro-Nine for her father and claim her mantle as Sith Lord beside her two elder sisters.

But there was a problem.

The galaxy was controlled by a militant class of creature called Nemecs, cosmic conquerors in their own right, a hive animal that descended on lush planets like locusts then left their offspring in the rotting husk to hatch. Though crudely armed by comparisons, they were highly intelligent, singularly-minded, and, worst of all, prolific. For every soldier in Her Majesty’s Imperial army, the Nemecs possessed a thousand. Each day, the number of casualties increased by the hundreds. In just nine months, the Nemecians had destroyed seventy percent of their fleet.

As far as he was concerned, this battle was their death rattle. Retreat was inevitable.

The Admiral told his lady as much this morning, _The only way to defeat an enemy as entrenched and numerous as the Nemecs is a tactical regrouping_.

As was typical, she had vehemently disagreed.

Now, her arms strained against their leather guards as she watched a Fighter from their fleet open fire on a Nemecian bunker. She rocked up onto the balls of her feet and scissored her thighs.

Violence made his lady restless.

“This is shaak shit,” she spat, furiously tossing her long, dark hair out of her face. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it slip past her shoulders and pool its wild ends in the curve of her lower back, above the crescent hilts that housed her halved kyber.

He clenched his lapel.

“Patience,” he reminded her mildly.

She pressed back onto her heels and stretched out her arms. Her head bowed, more of her beautiful mane sliding over her shoulder to fall against her face as she rocked and murmured too low for him to hear.

The Darkness was speaking to her, egging her on.

For a brief flash, he pictured himself crouched down behind her, whispering tender rebukes at her eagerness into her ear as his hand stroked her flank.

She’d feel so incredibly cold-

A hellish screech snapped him out of his fantasy. Another TIE Fighter was screaming towards the planet’s surface, trailing smoke in its wake.

Another twenty minutes, and their aerial infantry would be destroyed.

“My lady,” he spoke to her in a deep, measured murmur. She heard him best through her bloodlust when his tone was quiet, assertive. Controlled. “We must fall back-”

“No,” she shook her head. The ends of her long hair whispered softly across the floor.

Suddenly, she straightened. Her eyes were impossibly black as they stared out through the diamond glass at the world below them. “I’m going down.”

Adrenaline seized his heart.

He lifted his chin. “You will do no such thing-”

She was already pounding down the bridge.

His longer stride overtook her before she could break left for the corridor that lead to the main hanger. He caught her by the arm.

It was dangerous move at best, very possibly a deadly one. Stopping a Sith mid-lust was like snatching a cobra by its tail.

So he was not surprised when she turned on him, teeth gnashing as she twisted and snarled, “Let go of me!”

“Absolutely not.” He’d never been more sure of anything in his life. “If you leave this bridge, they will destroy you.” He bore down on her fiercely. “I will not allow that to happen.”

“Allow?” she gritted, still trying to wrench herself away from him.

He was prepared for that, standing solid through her furious thrashing. “Apologies, madam, did I speak too quickly for you? Yes, _allow_.”

“Let go!” she tangled their feet in an attempt to throw him over her shoulder, but he used the shift in her center of gravity against her, knocking her off-balance so that she dangled from his grip.

"You son of a luggabeast-" she let out a savage cry, “Take your fucking hands off me now! I swear to Dark, I will rip you in half-”

He tried not to sound out of breath now as he sneered at her down the length of his nose. “Laughable.”

Suddenly, without any warning, the hull rattled violently from the impact of an artillery carrier colliding with their defense shield.

She went perfectly still.

His heart dropped through his feet.

She glanced away from him, to the sliver of view-shield still visible over his shoulder. Her lashes flickered, her eyes began to move rapidly back-and-forth, as if she was listening very intently to someone speaking in a murmur.

They were alone inside the corridor.

“I have to go,” she whispered, still watching the glass behind him. Her eyes closed, the space between her brows creasing in a way that meant he was losing her. “It’s the only way-”

“Lady Ren,” he shocked her back to him by suddenly taking her face in his hands.

Even through his gloves, she was unbearably, beautifully cold.

Her lips parted. Hope, brilliant and mangling, twisted around his heart when she took his forearms but did not pull him away.

He looked deeply into her eyes.

“Remain here, with me,” his soul shook, but his voice never wavered, “and I swear to you, on my life, we will return to this place and make things right.”

“Armitage,” she whispered. Longing, glass-edged and burning, lashed through his gut.

Her head tilted. “You’re afraid.”

He felt a cool shadow sweep across his mind. She was reading his thoughts.

Again, without warning, their ship rattled with another direct hit.

Her fingers dug into his sleeves.

“Yes.” In this moment, he did nothing to hide the truth.

_I am terrified for you, my love._

“It hurts,” her face cracked. He could see her large, wet eyes were completely lightless. “It wants… I want-”

“I know what you want.” He stepped into her, so that their chests met. Her coldness seeped through his uniform coat to chill his skin.

_Glorious._

Slowly, without ever breaking eye contact, he let their foreheads meet in a tender touch. His gloved thumbs stroked her cheeks. “Remain with me, my lady, and we will return with ten thousand ships and destroy them all. We shall wipe their filth from galaxy. I give you my word.”

Again her lashes flickered. Her eyes dropped to his heart.

Embroidered over his uniform, above his many medals, was the insignia for the Universal Commonwealth.

Her father’s insignia.

The temperature in the corridor dropped noticeably. Adrenaline rushed up from the flats of his feet to ignite the desperation in his gut. He burned with fear for her.

The hull jolted from a third impact to their defense shield, the largest yet.

Her expression shifted, eyes darkening to black diamonds, lips peeling back over her teeth. Her fingers on his forearms dug painfully. When she looked back up at him, he saw only the Sith.

“You, fucking liar,” she spat.

"No, my lady-"

“ _Coward._ Go to hell.”

He sensed the tell-tale snap in his solar plexus that was the Dark Side a split second before his feet left the ground.

She flung him back against the wall.

The impact disoriented him, he had to shake his head to throw off the greying around the edges of his sight as he braced his hand on his knee and picked himself up off the floor. Through his swimming, stilted vision, he saw her cowl stream like a black banner behind her as she disappeared around a corner.

That way led down to the main hanger.

If she stepped out of this ship, she would die.

Stumbling a little before he found his footing, he pressed the comms piece near his ear.

“Omega?” he rasped.

The ship’s control protocol addressed him smoothly, _“Admiral Armitage Hux. How may I assist you?”_

He let his shoulder trail along the wall as he picked up his unsteady pace. Through his heartbeat in his throat, he told the system, “Lock down hanger seven’s interior access door." He swallowed, doing fast, dangerous math in his mind. "And increase the discharge to two thousand volts.”

_"Warning, exposure to strong electrical currents can result in serious injury or death. Safety protocol does not advise tampering with or altering the locking mechanism’s default settings. Would you like to make a different request?”_

“No.” He took the same corner she had with a grim expression.“Override.”

_“Overriding safety protocols. Initiating sequence to charge. Locking mechanism is charging."_

He moved faster down the hall as his heart shuddered against his ribs. By now, she would have almost reached the hanger.

_"Charge is at thirty-six percent.”_

He broke into a run.

_“Charge is at sixty-seven percent.”_

He took the last corner at a dead sprint, catching sight of her racing down the long catwalk ahead of him, her chakrams already out of their holsters in her hands.

He bellowed, “Stop!”

_“Charge is at eighty-four percent.”_

His fear had moved behind his eyes, pounding in time with his heart as he pushed himself to his physical limit. “Discord, _stop_!”

_“Charge is complete. Locking mechanism is armed.”_

Her hand hit the Open switch just as a blinding shower of white sparks burst from the control panel.

The blast threw her twenty feet.

“My lady,” he was on his knees as soon as he reached her. He knew that a shock that strong would stop even a Sith’s heart. He had to resuscitate her and carry her back to the infirmary to submerge her in a healing tank before she was fully awake. The bacta would keep her asleep until he had withdrawn what was left of the fleet and taken them a safe distance away from-

He didn’t hear the _click-burr_ of an igniting kyber crystal as he gripped the collar of her surcoat. He was about to rip it open when she blindly lashed out.

The curved arc of her chakram caught him in a deep gnash across the chest.

He fell back with a shout, landing on his forearms as he gasped and snarled through the pain.

Her face, twisted with fury, looked all around. Their eyes met.

For a single, terrifying moment, it seemed she was going to get up. 

Then her eyes closed. The chakram sputtered out in her hand.

She fainted.

 

 

 

 

She dreamt about falling.

Through infinite, starless, velvet dark.

 _Papa,_ she screamed.

But he did not answer.

Down, down she fell, as a great black maw rose up to meet her, jaws open to swallow her whole.

Dying.

She was going to die.

 _Papa!_ she shrieked. _Papa? Papa, where are you?_

_Here._

She reached out.

A hand caught her wrist. Solid and warm.

Not Papa’s.

Suspended in darkness, the stars began to bleed through all around her, tiny pinpricks of light that grew bolder with each rabbit-beat of her heart. They stretched her eyes and illuminated the form above her, drawing his silhouette against the black.

She jolted awake.

Her knee struck and cracked the glass of the bacta tank.

Naked and afraid, she thrashed. Her screaming flooded the tank with bubbles.

They floated to the top like a flock of doves taking to the sky.

Through the curved, split glass, she watched a medical drone skimming its way to her. It bleeped in a soothing loop as its fluted fingers tip-tapped at the panel outside.

Slowly, the warm water started to churn around her. It babbled softly, whispering in her ears like the lullabies her mother used to sing to her. Songs about sun and sand. Songs about love.

_Mama…_

Her eyelids drooped. Behind her ribs, her heartbeat began to slow.

But she was still afraid.

On the other side of the glass, a hazy, familiar figure emerged. He came closer and closer, not stopping until he reached the glass.

With the last of her strength, she lifted her hand and pressed it along the smooth surface.

A heartbeat later, his long, white fingers laid over hers.

_Here._

She slipped into a dreamless sleep.

 

 

 

The next time she woke, she was in her bed inside her imperial quarters.

Someone had dressed her in a simple dark shift. Her hair, usually tangled and wild, had been brushed smooth. Her skin felt soft from the warm, slick waters of the bacta tank.

As if by sixth sense, the pneumatic door to her bedroom opened with a quiet sigh, and he appeared, wearing just a crisp white dress shirt buttoned to the collar and his standard black slacks. His casual dress disarmed her; without his uniform coat and gloves, he looked next to naked.

She tried to remember if she’d ever seen him in anything other than full regalia when he spoke to her, softly.

“May I come in, my lady?”

She realized by the way his chin was angled, mouth twitching with gentle humor where he was propped against the seam in the wall that disguised her door, that she’d been staring openly.

Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to blush.

“Depends,” she leveled him a look, “Are you going to electrocute me?”

To her surprise, he hung his head. “I am truly, deeply sorry-”

His contrition made her strangely uneasy, as if she was the one who should feel guilty for worrying him. She thought of her mother, clucking over her father like a little mother hen, as her monstrous Sith placated her with sheepish looks and soft murmurs, _It’s just a scratch, beloved._

She snuffed out the domestic flutter with a huff. “For fuck's sake, Hux, nobody died. Although…”

He looked up just in time to see one corner of her mouth hitch impishly.

“It was pretty _shocking_ ,” she twitched her eyebrows.

Against his will, he snorted. His eyes lifted to the ceiling. “Holy, help us. Now she thinks she’s a wit. Just how badly was your brain scrambled?”

“Dunno,” she crossed her arms over her breasts and shrugged, in what she realized too late was an exact imitation of her mother’s infamous sass. Maybe she was a little mixed up from the blast. “Still smarter than you, though. I can guarantee you that.”

“You mean still a cocky little shit?" he smirked. "At least that's something."

She decided that counted as a laugh. After almost nine months, she’d finally made him laugh.

Strange, how light the thought made her chest.

But then, almost as soon as it came on, the feeling was replaced by a sudden, sinking sickness as she remembered where she was headed before the blast.

_The fleet._

She looked back at him, heart filled to the brim with fear.

Their eyes met.

Again, it was as if he could read her thoughts, because his humor had gone out like a candle. His mouth was set grimly, steeling himself for the question she had to ask.

“How bad did we lose?”

 

 

 

 

From his post near the titanic double doors, he watched her turn around and around in the center of the hanger, her grief-filled disbelief bearing down his heart.

“No,” she kept saying, hands raking again and again through her hair. Her feet were still bare on the cold, corrugated durasteel.

She had refused to change in her rooms, pushing past him in her shift, down the elevator and through corridors, her breath quick with panic, he a silent, somber shadow behind her. Once inside the hanger, she couldn’t stop turning, scanning over and over along the upward-spanning walls at what was left of her inheritance.

Nothing but scraps.

“No no no, this isn’t-”

She stopped finally and faced him, her long hair falling sweetly over one shoulder, past her breast, to kiss her waist. Without her raiment or her savage determination, she looked her true age.

Just a girl, standing in the steel belly of her father’s empire, playing general.

“This can’t be _everything_ ,” her mouth trembled. She tried to gather her anger as she looked into his eyes, willing him to deny it. “Tell me, this isn’t everything.”

He slipped his hands inside his pockets. The move tugged the mark across his chest, the one from her chakram. Seamed together by bacta tape, bound tightly beneath his shirt, its dull, persistent ache echoed the one for her inside his heart.

“I’m afraid it is, my lady.”

Her breath caught. She covered her face with her hands and collapsed.

He was across the hanger, on his knees with his arms wound tightly around her, before she ever touched the steel.

“Papa-” she screamed heartbroken into his neck. Her body shook with grief. “Papa, no, I’m sorry- I’m so sorry- Papa forgive me- forgive me, please- _Please-”_

He rocked her.

 

 

 

Hours later, they still laid together on the floor.

The patterned steel dug sharp impressions into him, while his love rested pressed against his side, her fingers tracing his shirt buttons, cheek laid over his heart. His chest wound ached, he was cold everywhere they touched.

He wanted to freeze time.

“You don’t understand,” she was saying. Her voice was rough from crying.

She propped her chin on his breast to look at him. Her lashes were still wet, the end of her nose bright pink.

He thumbed her cheek. "Then explain it to me."

“We Siths only have one rule, _You get what you’re strong enough to keep._ When my father finds out I failed, he’ll judge me.”

She swallowed, glancing away from his gentle stare. “He'll think I don’t deserve my Darkness. That I'm unworthy-”

“No, my lady,” his naked fingers touched away her fresh tears. Where his other arm ran the length of her body, he circled his fingertips softly over the back of her strong, bare thigh.

If he didn’t allow his mind to telescope outward, he could pretend in this moment that they were lovers.

“You are not _unworthy_ -”

She flinched.

“You are not,” he repeated. His tone was as convicted as it was tender. “You are still very young, and untried in the ways of war. Yes, your combat skills are exceptional. They always have been-”

She snorted wetly, rolling her eyes at his rare bit of praise.

He took the chance to lace their fingers together where her hand laid on his chest. His mark burned, but he relished the pain.

“That’s me,” she agreed bitterly, looking at their locked hands. She flexed her fingertips, stroking his knuckles. “The strong, stupid one.”

“Not at all,” he assured her. “Winning is simply a different skill. Like any other, it is the product of experience. And time.”

“I should've listened to you,” she whispered. Her mouth warbled. She looked deeply into his eyes. “I should have trusted you, Armitage. You tried to tell me, but… I was so desperate to prove myself. To _be_ _like_ him. Now all those men are gone, because of me." She shook her head. "I've ruined everything.”

He did not know what compelled him, if it was her vulnerability, or all the months of being so close to her yet so far away from her heart, or if it was just her beauty, raw and right in front of him, that made him draw her hand to his mouth and press a kiss to her knuckles.

Her expression was unreadable as she watched.

“I gave you my word-” his heart danced savagely against his breast to a wild, pagan drum, “that if you remained with me, I would set things right.”

“But how?” her gaze drifted hopelessly around the empty hanger. “We lost everything.”

“Trust me,” he implored her. “That is all I ask. Trust me, and I will give you everything you desire.”

She smiled, a sad, bitter smile. “You sound like the Darkness.”

“But I mean what I say. Let me help you, as I am meant to. Please.”

In one breath, they were staring into each other's eyes. Then in the next, her hair fell softly all around him, like the curtain of night, as she leaned down and covered his mouth with her own.

Her lips were cool and soft, and tasted of salt.

The kiss was brief and chaste, almost familial. But it churned within him an ocean of feeling far vaster than any galaxy in the universe.

When it was over, she laid her cheek back down over his heart. She sounded exhausted, her voice younger than he'd ever heard it before as she whispered,

“Can I keep you forever?”

He closed his eyes. Shining high above, the lights of the hanger washed his eyelids pure white.

“As long as my lady likes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I KNOW! You asked me for a shortie about Kylo and Hux's reaction to finding out they are joined together in unholy matrimony, and I give you this bullshit. 
> 
> A re-write of The Last of the Mohicans.
> 
> What the hell, Pastel, what the HELL!
> 
> This backstory will only be two parts. Only two, I promise. Before I get to the parental meltdowns, I just want to explain how exactly Discord and Hux IV ended up together. In the longest, most unnecessary way possible. For literary integrity.
> 
> Obviously.
> 
> If you're reading this flaming trash fire, stop. For the love of God, stoooop.


	3. Melody Unchained

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *snickering*

“Son of Darkness,” his lady snarled into his back, “this sunlight is so _fucking_ bright-”

“Brilliant deduction, my lady,” he tossed back wryly. His arm reached behind him, creating a subtle barrier between her and the crush of oncoming pedestrians as he maneuvered them onto a walkway shaded by the angle of the buildings spanning above.

Their unmarked ship had landed on Celucea at mid-day, when the planet’s treble suns where at their peak.

Celucea was inside Messier-13, a spiral-shaped galaxy on the northern border of the Commonwealth. Amongst the colonies, the small world was known for its unbelievable technological advancements and unique urban planning, designed exclusively by the eccentric billionaire engineer who privately owned it. Layered in complex helixes of diamond glass and polished durasteel, its cities climbed thousands of kilometers above its surface, each sprawling metropolis gleaming like quicksilver under a tri-sun sky.

To a Sith Lord, it was unbearably bright.

Which is why his lady was stumbling behind him through the crowds thronging the streets of Crusa, Celucea’s largest city, head down and fists balled firmly in the back of his dark civilian jacket, the hood of her cowl pulled down directly over her dark sunshades, and her eyes closed behind them.

She had bitched the entire way.

Her forehead bumping lightly between his shoulders as he stopped them at crossing.

“ _How_ is this less conspicuous that my mask?” she snapped.

A sleek, dazzling hoverbus passed, the sunlight reflecting off its windows bright even to his blue eyes behind their mirrored aviator sunglasses.

As if sensing its gleam through his body, she pressed closer, burrowing her face in his jacket with a frustrated mewl. He felt the shape of her sunglasses on in his shoulder, and the softness of her breasts against his back.

For the hundredth time, he remembered their kiss inside the hanger.

His heart tripped inside his chest.

“Do not be obtuse,” he tapped her thigh to let her know they were moving again as the signal turned to _Walk_. “You know how the people feel about Siths. Can you imagine, the pandemonium it would cause if they knew you were among them?”

“Yes,” a savage smirk bled through her answer. “It’d be total chaos. Running, screaming- some of them would set fires-”

She was winding herself up.

“As delightful as that all sounds-” he tapped her other thigh, to indicate they were turning left, “It is not our goal today.”

Up ahead, their destination rose glimmering through the middle of the city. A great, ovular tower made from mirrored diamond-glass and capped with some sort of prismatic, crystalline material, it spanned upward through every layer of the helix, reaching sparkling towards the suns.

“Arm-i-taaage,” she wrung the back of his jacket.

Since that night in the hanger, she no longer called him Admiral or Hux. Only Armitage.

He hadn’t the willpower to correct her.

Right now, her soft, insistent tugging and childish mewling were having an inconvenient effect on his cock.

“It’s _hot_. I’m _hungry_. I want to _kill_ something. Arm-i- _taaage-_ ”

_Oh for fuck’s sake-_

He stopped dead in his tracks on the sidewalk. Startled, she clapped her arms around him.

“My lady,” his head turned, so that over his shoulder, she could see the seriousness of his profile, “we are very nearly there. I can do nothing about the heat, however, there is a nutritional unit in my breast pocket which you may have when we arrive. But if you do not stop your caterwauling, I will put you back on the ship.”

His chin tilted, so that his blue stare met hers over the top of his aviators, “Am I clear?”

She snorted. “Um, who died and made you Darth?”

His eyebrow quirked over the frame of his shades. “One…”

Her head dropped back. “Ugh, _fine._ Fucking Darkness-”

He inclined obeisantly. “Thank you.”

“Whatever,” she arranged her hands on his shoulders. Her face tucked into his back against the bright, muffling her huffed, “Can we go?”

He looked back at great domed obelisk. Its pinnacle gleamed so brightly it hurt even the Admiral’s eyes through his shades.

_Sharp Tower._

Their only hope.

His mouth set determinedly. “Certainly.”

 

 

 

 

Ten minutes later, they shambled into a pristine, empty lobby on the four thousandth floor of the tower.

While his lady examined critically at the sleek white interior, the Admiral removed his aviators, trading them with his breast pocket for the nutripack he’d brought specifically for her. Siths were voracious creatures, he realized early on in his career, and his in particular was insatiable when it came to her appetites. He had found satisfying her desires to be an even more challenging committment than commanding her soldiers. It required strategy, experience, and tenacity, as well as a masochist’s tolerance for criticism and a dogged will to persist despite impossible odds.

He hoped to serve her until the day he died.

On that thought, he peeled apart the foil wrapping and folded it back before he handed it to her.

She rewarded him by snatching it out of his grip and then scoffing, “It’s a chocolate one? Ugh, these things taste like ass.”

“It has a higher protein content,” he rebuked mildly, folding his hands behind his back. He watched her explore around the lobby, her sunshades still on to protect her delicate eyesight. Natural light flooded the building through the atrium that fell in a great column all the way through the center of the tower, its sheer drop separated at each level by an acrylic wall that reached waist-high.

She leapt up onto the barrier, balancing in a crouch on its razor-thin width with one hand braced between her feet as she peered down the shaft.

He tried not to notice how her leather strained across the breadth of her ass as, with her other hand still holding her nutripack, she pushed back her cowl and lifted her shades. Her hair fell in a black waterfall to her waist.

The mark in his chest burned for her.

She was stunning.

“Whoa…” she breathed, twisting and waving him over. Foil crinkled, scattering crumbs everywhere as she piped, “Armitage, come here! You gotta see this…”

Hands clasped behind him, he came to her side.

“Do you see how high up we are?” She peered down, then craned her neck and squinted to see up through the light. Sunlight, brilliant and clear, spilled down the glassine surfaces of the atrium, making the world sparkle like the inside of a diamond.

Her hair slipped past her shoulder.

He resisted the impulse to strum it through his fingers.

“What is this place?” she murmured. “It’s like the inside of a star. It’s bright, but it doesn’t hurt-” She closed her eyes. “Can you hear that?”

All he heard was the pounding of his heart.

“It’s singing to me,” she whispered.

Suddenly, her body swayed out over the shaft of the atrium. Her sunglasses slid off the top of her head, falling down and down through the wide shaft until they disappeared from sight.

Adrenaline pour hot and tingling into his gut as he imagined her falling to her death.

“My lady-” he caught her arm harder than he intended to. His heart ratta-tatted within his throat.

She looked at him.

His beautiful, feral girl.

“Armitage?”

His throat bobbed. He loosened his grip on her arm. “Please come down.”

His breath released when she hopped, then caught again when she missed her landing and tangled herself with his boots. She stumbled into him, cool and soft against his chest.

“Sorry,” she breathed, “the light’s so bright-”

Without meaning to, he took her by the hips.

“It’s quite alright,” he murmured. This close, he could see the small specks of dark on her cheeks and one slightly above her brow.

_Beautiful._

“I can’t really see my surroundings,” she whispered. The tips of her fingers slipped over his features. “Just you.”

“Ah,” he said eloquently.

He didn’t know if he was leaning down, or if she was pressing upward, but their mouths seemed to be drifting closer and closer. For a room that was lit with the light of three suns, it felt remarkably, sensuously cold.

“The light makes me feel strange,” she closed her eyes. Her head tilted like she was listening to something in the distance. She started to go slack inside his arms. “Makes me feel warm. But it’s not hurting me…”

“I- do you- should you sit down?”

“I don’t think it’s the suns,” she whispered. Her eyes opened.

Within them, there was light he’d never seen before, like the shine of distant stars.

“Armitage?” her head tipped back. Behind her, her cool, dark hair slid like silk over his bare hands. Her voice was so soft, it was as if he’d dreamed it. “Do you ever think about me?”

His heart stopped inside his chest.

“I daresay. On occasion.” Foil crinkled quietly behind his ear. Vaguely, he realized her hand over his shoulder was stroking at his nape, cold touches lulling him to a sweetly dangerous place. He added, rather unconvincingly, “In a professional sense, of course.”

“Really?” Slowly, so slowly, her full lips peeled apart. “I think about you. A lot. At night…”

Her eyes dropped to his mouth.

“I see.” Want mangled his gut. His hands, he realized, were roaming her body, smoothing through the curve of her waist and along her back. He sifted her hair through his fingers, suffocating on the sensation of her fingers softly raking over his chest. He had no choice, he realized, but to kiss her.

Deeply.

She moaned sweetly into his mouth.

Time seemed to stop for them, sand suspended between the halves of an hourglass as he made love to her with kisses. Their tongues touched and twined, he could tell by the way she rushed and stumbled that no man had known her this way before. The thought burned electric within his gut as he enfolded her in his arms, possessing her completely.

She pressed closer even, unabashed in the way she stroked his hair, his neck, the bulge of his arms, his beltline, while her mind projected back to his the things she imagined in the night.

What sweet, filthy things.

His gloved fingers buried deep inside her lovely cunt. Their bodies, naked and entwined on a steel floor, moving in tandem as they panted into each other’s mouths. His lips on her breast. Hers around his cock, as he sat in captain’s chair on the bridge, fist wrapped in her long, loose hair-

He groaned and lifted her by the soft, full globes of her ass.

She wrapped her legs around him.

“Now, that’s an interesting side effect.”

While the sudden voice rattled the Admiral, it seemed to positively frighten his lady. She jolted, scrambling and leaping back as if he’d burned her.

“My lady?”

Her eyes scrunched. She shook her head viciously and snarled.

“Wednesday,” the owner of the voice, a lean, good-looking man with a dark goatee and sharp white suit, addressed an unseen assistant. “Make a note that the crystals have had a-” he rolled his wrist, “aphrodisiac-like effect on the Sithling.”

 _“Yes, sir,”_ a synthetic voice responded from somewhere above.

“Sithling?” the Admiral growled dangerously, at the same time his lady hissed, “ _Light-monger!”_

She was still stumbling, grinding the heels off her hands against her eyes and shaking her head as if to throw off her confusion. Her face was contorted into a grimace.

He reached for her, concern drowning out the thought of threat. “My lady-”

Her hand groped for his sleeve, she let him draw her into his arms.

“The Light-” she rubbed her face into his chest. “It’s calling me-”

Her hands twisted in his shirt. She mewled, “Make it stop.”

“I don’t know how,” helplessness twisted his gut.

The man in white was fascinated. “So you _can_ hear them?”

He sidled past them to the acrylic barrier to the atrium and propped his foot, laying his arms on top of the wall so that he could lean out. He craned his neck to peer at the prismatic dome up above. “Incredible.” He shook his head. “She was so sure she was the only one…”

“I beg your pardon,” the Admiral’s helplessness was converting to outrage. This idiot cockatoo couldn’t possibly be the man they came to see. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”

“Oh, I know who she is,” the man in white turned. Smirking, he leaned casually with his elbow on the wall. His eyes swept over the Sith in a way the Admiral gravely disliked.

“Princess of Darkness? King Kylo’s chosen one? Funny, I thought she’d be taller.” He eyed the Admiral. “And her captain, oh her captain. Admiral Armitage Hux, the-”

He cocked his head, pretending to think about it. “What, are you guys on now? Eleventh, twelfth?”

“The fourth,” replied the Admiral coolly.

“Right, right. The fourth.” The man in white’s dark eyes flicked over him. “Hey, does Darth Daddy know you have your hand in her cookie jar? Or are you one of the chum he hand-picks for them?”

_Chum?_

The Admiral’s heart dropped through his feet.

Her father had offered her suitors? To marry?

“How does it work, exactly?” the man in white was smirking, “Does he pair you off, or just toss you into their tank?”

“ _You_ , fucking Light-monger-”

The Admiral saw the bright arc of red laser-light a split second before he heard the _click-burr_ of one of her chakrams igniting.

Snarling like a savage, she lunged and swung. “ _Traitor!”_

The man in white dodged her neatly. “Whoa-ho, hey. Hold on there, Chipper.”

The lobby suddenly flooded with a high-pitched sound, like the whine of a fast compact turbine, as the entire bay began to rattle.

Drones, half a dozen of them, each the size of a large man, hovered in V-formation inside the atrium. Their faces had no features, apart from two slanted, glowering eyes.

In unison, they raised their hands. Spherical power cells glowed blinding-white within their palms.

Compact laser canons.

“Let’s not get crazy,” said the man in white. He was smirking at Lady Discord.

His drones zeroed in on her.

His lady bared her teeth back. “What are they?”

Beside her, the Admiral couldn’t help but marvel. “They’re what we came here for.”

She cocked her head.

At the sound of his voice, one of the drones turned in his direction.

“Hey!” she shouted. There was a _whip-whirr_ as her second chakram ignited.

The droid swung back around.

“Don’t even look at him,” she snarled.

“Guys,” the man in white held out his hands. The instant he stepped out in front of them, the drones lowered their light canons.

He flashed them both a disarming smile. “We got off on the wrong foot here. Let me introduce myself-”

The Admiral and his lady shared a dubious glance.

“I’m Antoni Sharp.” The man in white’s smile widened. “I work for your mother.”

 

 

 

 

_“Tea, Your Highness?”_

A service drone bowed graciously with a laden tray.

Next to him, his lady pulled a face. “Why, is it poisoned?”

“No, thank you,” he told the drone.

 _“Very good, sir,”_ it skimmed out through the service door.

They sat close together at the end of a grand white conference table, waiting for Sharp to return. His lady seemed unbalanced by something, both her hands fiddled with one of his beneath the table as she scrutinized all their possible exits. Her black raiment and dark hair were arresting against the pale backdrop of the spacious board room.

Even in their uncertain circumstance, he found himself lost to her vicious beauty.

A sudden stab of jealousy struck true inside his gut.

Was her father really presenting her with suitors?

He would kill the rival.

“Armitage?”

He hadn’t realized he’d made a fist until she pried his fingers open. She was watching him with a worried look.

“Are you okay?” she whispered, tracing the lines of his face with her eyes. Again, there was that strange, soft light beneath her lashes.

His mark ached.

_Damn it all._

“Has your father tried to arrange your marriage?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ugh, yes.”

His nostrils flared.

“It’s honestly so annoying,” she kept her voice low as she flicked her hair back over her shoulder, “Like, how stupid does he think I am? Duh, I know he wants me to go out with those guys. But like, _gross_ , they’re super-ugly and I’m not even into warlords like that-”

“You will _not_ ,” his breath shook. He burned with rage, “give yourself to some… worthless war-monger. I will cut off his head-”

“Seriously?” Her eyebrows twitched. She glanced at his mouth. “That’d be really hot.”

“Absolutely, I-” he paused, “would it?”

“Are you kidding?” her cold hands slid firmly up his thighs, “I’d be so into that…”

“ _Really?”_ he smirked, cock twitching as her hands smoothed up his chest. He took her waist between his hands while she held his shoulders, pulse thrumming when she slipped off her chair into his lap.

“I don’t know what it is about this place,” she murmured, dark eyes looking deeply into his, “but I can’t stop touching you…”

Their mouths moved closer. Her hair fell like a dark curtain around his face.

He stroked it reverently.

“I have zero complaints.”

Her eyes flickered closed.

“Would you two like a room?”

Sharp had returned, wearing black with a white tie this time, and a shit-eating grin to boot. “We have an Imperial suite upstairs. Huge balcony, great views. Continental breakfast.”

A seat at the opposite end of the table slipped out for him. He flopped down and kicked his feet up. The soles of his shoes were red.

“The bed sleeps three,” he waggled his eyebrows.

The Admiral snorted.

“Tinkerer, please,” his lady crossed her legs in his lap. She shook her mane back over her shoulders. “I’d crush you like a bug.”

Sharp grinned. “That’s the only way to go.”

He let his feet fall to the tile and propped his elbows on the table. Meticulously, he stacked his hands. “Let’s start over. What brings you two love-bats to my humble little corner of the universe?”

“How about you _start,”_ her eyes narrowed, “by explaining to me why this planet is covered in Light. It’s everywhere. What’s it doing here?” She bared her teeth, “Where did you _get it_?”

He sat back. The short, neat whiskers of his goatee bristled quietly as he stroked them.

She tensed like a snake in the Admiral’s lap.

Finally, Sharp spoke. “Alright, then. Straight to the point. That dome up there?”

He pointed, indicating the top of the tower. “That’s solid welded kyber. Ten thousand crystals, to be exact. And this,” he tapped both index fingers on the surface of the table, “this is a convergence point of-”

“Of the Light Side,” she finished. Her voice trembled with rage.

“You… built a vector… out of kyber… on a concentration of Light energy?” her hands clenched, “In _my_ father’s galaxy?”

He sat back and laced his hands behind his head. “Yes.”

Her fist slammed the table as she stood. “You, fucking blasphemer!”

The Admiral reached past her, waving his hand to interject. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the significance-”

“It’s a fucking Light-temple,” she spat. Her fingers raked through her hair.

Sharp shrugged. “Technically, it’s live-work-play structure that harnesses Force energy to power itself-”

“It’s an abomination,” she hissed over the table.

“The Association of Architecture called it _engineering poetry_ -”

 “When my father finds out you built this,” she leaned in, “he will destroy you.”

Sharp examined his cuticles. “He might want to talk to your mother first.” He looked up at her with a slow, sly smile. “She’s the one who asked me to build it.”

“ _Liar.”_ Discord’s hand shot out.

Sharp wrenched up from his seat, sputtering with his hands around his neck.

The droid-sentries near the door engaged the power cells in their palms.

“My lady,” the Admiral laid his hand on her arm. His eyes were already scanning the droids for weak points.

There were none.

“It’s cool,” croaked Sharp. He made a motion for the drones to stand down. “We’re cool. We’re just having a friendly chat, aren’t we Princess-”

Her hand throttled.

Sharp gargled. His face began to purple.

“My lady,” the Admiral tried again, speaking very mildly. This time, he touched her hip. “We have relinquished our weapons. If these drones attack, I am wholly unarmed.”

Her mouth twitched. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at him.

Her intensity wavered.

_Almost there-_

“It would be remarkable if I survived.”

Her arm fell.

Sharp dropped gasping to the smooth white tile.

The Admiral released a slow, subtle breath.

“Why would my mother ask you build a Light temple?” she asked.

“She didn’t… ask me… to b-” Sharp stopped and hacked. He wiped the spittle off his mouth with his suit sleeve. “She didn’t ask me… to build a Light temple. She asked me to build weapon, and I needed a power source-” he coughed and rasped, “big enough to run it…”

She looked back at the Admiral.

Excitement was beginning to build low in his gut. He nodded at Sharp. “Go on.”

“You’re the Sith,” Sharp grimaced. He was using the table edge to pick himself up off the floor, “So you tell me, how easy is it to harness Dark energy? I mean really control it, bend it to your will?”

“For you?” she sneered, looking him up and down, “Impossible. The Darkness belongs to my father-”

“ _Exactly_. So long as Daddy Cool’s got a monopoly on the Dark Side,” still panting, he leaned for support, “the rest of us have to find a different way to fry our bacon-” He winced, trying to massage the scratch out of his voice with his hand on this throat. His eyes were still watering. “Guess I know why they call you the crazy sister-”

She snorted.

His chin jerked at the Admiral. “And why they call you the Tamer.”

The Admiral’s lips twitched against a smirk. “Nothing of the sort, I assure you.”

“But what kind of weapon did she ask you to build?” She shook her head, “And why would she need one?”

“It’s not for her.” The Admiral folded his hands on the table and leaned in. If the rumors were true, then-

Sharp gave him a long, meaningful look. “Correct.”

“You’ve completed the prototype,” guessed the Admiral.

“Oh, we’re well beyond prototypes,” Sharp’s grin had returned, along with a mad glint to his eyes. He opened his hands to the room at large. “We’re talking full-scale production.”

Based on their last encounter with the Necems, the Admiral was already doing the math. “How many are ready?”

Sharp shrugged enigmatically. “As many as you need.”

The Ardmiral smiled a skeleton’s smile, with all his teeth. “Excellent.”

“I’m sorry,” Discord held up her hands, “someone tell me, what the fuck you two are talking about?”

“I can do you one better, Princess,” Sharp twitched his eyebrows.

“I can show you.”

 

 

 

For a Sith, the elevator was unbearably hot.

The Light inside this place was doing strange things to her. It wove itself between her cells, trying to edge out her Darkness as it thrummed through her veins, giving her bizarre, agitating thoughts. Thoughts of tenderness. Thoughts of love.

She held the Admiral’s hand.

It happened before she realized, her fingers lacing through his as they stepped in behind Sharp and his android guards. Their palms kissed, his larger than hers, hard and infinitely warm, and she’d felt… comforted.

It disgusted her.

Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to let go.

“Is everything alright?” he had dipped to murmur in her ear.

Hot electricity lashed down her spine as the Light inside her sang his name.

_Armitage._

“My lady?” his cool blue eyes were pinched with concern.

“Mm? Oh,” she ground the heel of her hand against her forehead. Along the periphery of her mind, Darkness stalked and snarled. “Sorry. I just… can’t get my head around it. My mother, building some… secret weapon? I mean, have you _seen_ my mother?”

She made a space with her thumb and index finger. “She’s this big.”

The Admiral’s mouth twitched.

“All the more reason to be clever,” he observed mildly.

She snorted, then waited for his gaze to turn before she snuck another peek at him through her lashes.

Had he always been this tall?

The elevator stopped, and she was still holding onto him. Against the urging of the Light, which was whispering to her to wrap herself up in his arms and mew at him until he made love to her, she let go.

He glanced but said nothing, gesturing politely for her to proceed him through the doors.

Always polite, this one.

Was he like that when he fucked?

 _Stop_ , she wanted to slap herself, _Stop stop stop-_

Sharp had taken them underground, into a basement or bunker of some kind, she could tell by the cool stillness in the air, and the lack of natural light. The white walls of the corridor spanned high above them, but the passage itself was very narrow, utilitarian. The floor space on this level was being used for something else.

But what?

At the end of the hallway, past Sharp and his drone-sentries, was a single door with a key panel and an access scanner.

She held out her arm to slow the Admiral’s stride, then stepped in front, putting herself between him and the drones. She had no idea where Sharp was leading them, and without his rapier or blaster, her Admiral was totally unarmed. And while his skills in hand-to-hand combat were notorious throughout the Commonwealth, she was keenly aware they were useless against a four-hundred-pound android.

At the thought of one attacking him, Darkshear crackled audibly through her aura.

“Easy, Chipper,” Sharp tapped in his access code and scanned his hand against the panel. He wore a sly, slanted smile that made her uneasy.

Reaching behind him beneath his suit jacket, Sharp withdrew the crescent-shaped hilts of her chakrams and held them up so she could see.

The bled kyber halves within them called to her.

Despite the Light surrounding this place, her Darkness began to gather.

“Wanna see what’s behind door number one?” Sharp hit a flashing green button on the panel, and the pneumatic door hissed open. Pitch black beckoned her inside.

The Darkness smiled.

“My lady-” the Admiral hedged behind her.

Sharp threw her chakrams into the dark. “Go fetch.”

The Admiral lunged out to catch her, “Discord-”

But she was already racing past Sharp.

Inside the range, her eyes adjusted instantly the lack of light. She found her chakrams straight ahead, skidding fast across the polished concrete. She dove and reached, calling her kybers home to her. They smacked into her hands and ignited, crystals screaming as they came to life.

Her boot strained out, she stopped her knee-slid smoothly, landing stretched out in a crouch along the smooth concrete.

Red laser disks cast long, arcing shadows around the cavernous space.

“My lady!” the Admiral shouted through the door.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m here, I’m fine, everything’s fine-”

A sudden _snap-click-whirrr,_ like the sound of a turbine powering on, whined over the hum of her chakrams.

Something else was in the room with her.

White-hot stadium lights clicked on above, revealing a range as large as her ship’s hanger. The flash blinded her for a moment; she flinched back, hissing at the painful strain until they dimmed.

“Lady Discord!”

“Ugh, it’s okay, Armitage. It’s just light, it’s annoying but it’s not going to kill me-”

“ _Discord get up_!”

“Holy _shit!”_

She leapt up and skittered backwards.

In the low light stadium stood a droid-fighter more massive than the any she’d ever seen before. Almost the height of her sire, it spanned eight feet from the cement floor.

“What the fuck is that?”

It was built was like the sentries that guarded Sharp, but a titanic version. Its gleaming, plated armor was purely white. Instantly, it reminded her of-

“A Stormtrooper,” the Admiral murmured. He came to stand beside her, craning up at the drone in awe.

“I thought we should go bold, you know?” On the other side of him, Sharp was sauntering onto the range. He wore a shit-eating grin. “Red, or gold, maybe. But the Supreme Leader wanted something a little more… iconic,” he gestured, “if you will.”

She shifted, and the android turned its head to follow.

“Go ahead,” Sharp made a shooing motion, “take it for a spin.”

Her laser disks still burred in her hands. She struck the blades together, and they created a hot shower of red sparks.

Sharp and the Admiral moved back as the droid hunkered into a combat stance.

“Be. Careful,” the Admiral was giving her a very serious look.

She crouched. “’kay.”

Without preamble, one of the droid’s arms snapped out in front of it. It began to shift shape, white exoskeleton separating and rearranging around the blue-glowing cables inside it to form what looked like an Imperial standard-issue Z-6 riot baton.

Its laser bands ignited, cracking at the air and flooding the field with the chemical scent of scorched ions.

She attacked.

It moved faster than she anticipated, stepping back with her forward momentum to soften the power of her swing as it blocked. She flexed and sprung, leaping over its shoulder and pivoting on her landing to arc her blade across its back.

It turned and kicked her.

The force of its blow knocked her ass-over-end ten feet across the range. She caught herself in a low crouch, chakrams digging into the concrete to stop her backslide as, on the sidelines, the Admiral winced.

“It’s bloody fast,” he remarked.

She huffed and winced, sternum burning where the droid’s foot had struck her.

“Yeah no fucking shit, C-3,” she spat back, not taking her eyes off it as she picked herself up off the floor. Her sternum popped. “Stop distracting me-”

The android launched without warning.

She parried its downswing and spun under its arm, slicing a section out of its abdomen with her blade as she went. She used its jarred momentum to throw it forward with a headbutt to the back. It rebalanced and turned, trailing blue laser light as it arced its baton arm through an uppercut.

She ducked. Stepping around its follow-through, just like her father had taught her, she spun and struck down. The blade of her chakram bit through its baton-arm.

Its laser bands clattered disembodied to the floor.

With a sharp kick to its back, she sent it stumbling across the range, struggling to rebalance itself with only a single arm.

Its lost riot baton spat and sputtered out on the floor.

On the sideline, the Admiral stood with one arm was crossed over his chest, opposite elbow folded over it. His chin was pinched between thumb and middle finger, index finger resting along his jaw. His cool blue eyes followed her.

“Descent,” he conceded.

The corner of her mouth ticked upward. Holstering her chakrams, she checked back with the droid. Where she’d severed its arm surged smooth blue laser light.

A wave of cold disappointment rushed over her. Even if Sharp had a million of these drones, if _she_ could decommission one this quickly, the Nemecs with their numbers would rip the entire fleet to shreds in a matter of minutes.

They were back at square-one.

Her chest smarted, from the kick and from the crushing weight of her failure. She propped her hands on her hips and shook her head at the floor.

_Hopeless._

“Look,” said the Admiral. He was smiling, another ghoulish, wicked smile.

Several yards down the range from her, the droid had reattached its arm.

No, not reattached, she realized, spotting the dead laser baton still on the floor at her feet.

It had _regrown_ its arm.

Her eyes widened. “What the…”

“Instantaneous Syntrophic Regeneration, ISR,” Sharp explained smugly. “You take an arm,” he gestured to her, “it grows a new one,” he gestured to the newly whole droid.

Excitement, like the first spark of hope, flared inside her gut.

She angled her head to see its new limb better. “How?”

“Nanoparticles,” Sharp supplied conversationally. “Billions of them, powered by Light energy, programmed as living, thinking cells.” He grinned. “It was your mother’s idea.”

She gaped. “My _mother_?”

“With a little help from yours-truly, of course,” his smirk falsified his humility. Slipping his hands inside his pockets, he stepped onto the range.

The Admiral followed, his blue eyes narrowed with interest.

“We wanted to create an army of super-soldiers that would be indestructible. We tried every material known to the universe- durasteel, poly-synthetics, diamond-glass-” He grimaced, “you wouldn’t believe how sharp the shrapnel was from those bad boys.”

“I can imagine,” the Admiral remarked at her side.

“Every prototype we invented had some Achilles heel. Heat, blast intensity, sound waves. Then your father came back from his campaign in Ursula-Major, and your mother had an idea-”

“Force-healing,” Discord whispered.

“Bingo,” Sharp snapped his fingers and pointed, “give the Princess a prize.”

She remembered her father’s campaign to Ursula-Major, a galaxy beyond the then-border of the Commonwealth. It was controlled by a dark force with many minions. After months of war, when victory seemed hopeless for the Empire, her father stepped onto the field and single-handedly brought down the dark force and its entire army with the Darkness.

The act nearly destroyed him.

Captain Phasma and team of medical drones brought him back to their home on Mustafar in a bacta-bag. She could still remember her mother’s scream from the staircase when she saw her husband.

It was the single most terrifying moment of Discord’s life, watching them move her sire to a healing capsule, connecting to tubing and monitors, while he lay still and unblinking. Her father, mortal and forsaken by the Darkness.

The memory still made her sick with fear.

Her mother had him brought into to her sunroom, where the light through the south-facing windows was strongest, streaming in golden shafts that strained Discord’s eyes to look at. Then she submerged herself with him inside the tank.

For six days, her parents laid in each other’s arms, tucked away like babes inside the bacta-cradle, while the Captain kept watch from a chair in the shadows.

He rose on the seventh day.

Discord would never forget that moment, in all her life, when her father climbed out of the healing waters. Though still massive, his complexion had changed completely, the Darkness that mottled him receded to reveal pale, perfect skin and warm brown eyes. Human.

And her mother, her beautiful mother had been a vision as she took her father’s hand and stepped out of the cradle. Light, powerful and life-giving, sung all around her. It hurt Discord’s eyes, but she had been unable to look away, and when her mother hugged her, the feeling of being so perfectly loved had overwhelmed her, and she’d wept.

Her eyes were wet now as she looked at the android standing tall and whole before her.

This weapon, it wasn’t a weapon at all. It was an act of mercy, from a mother on behalf of her daughters, to spare them the bondage to Darkness their father suffered in exchange for his power.

A pardon from the Light.

“No more clone soldiers. No more Darkness,” she stepped up to the droid. Its chin tipped down to scan her through its visor.

She felt no fear.

Only a sense of soaring, like she was flying higher than the stars.

“We call them Legion,” Sharp gestured around, at the walls of the range. Track lights that ran the length of the ceiling illuminated rows upon rows upon rows of drones like the one in front of her, dangling from suspended docking stations. “For they are many.”

She looked at the Admiral. The savage gleam in his eyes matched the grin spreading over her face.

_This is how we win._

“I want to go again,” she said. Her fingers shook as she unholstered her chakrams. “I want to go now.”

Sharp smirked, “Be my guest.”

He rapped his knuckles on the android. Then he and the Admiral cleared the range.

Her heart thrashed behind her ribs as she squared off with the drone. With a feral cry, she ignited her kybers and attacked.

It launched to engage.

Over and over, she came at it with everything she had. Twice, she cleaved it in half with her chakrams, only to watch it seal itself back together in a blinding wash of blue light. She struck it multiple times with her Darkshear, each jolt strong enough to kill a man. The android juddered then recovered, resetting itself into a defensive pose after only seconds of processing. She shot it with a blaster, an inciner-ray, a laser canon. She tore off its limbs, lacerated its body with her laser disks, even set it on fire. She called on her Darkness and fought with everything she had, whirling and twisting as she landed blow after devastating blow with enough force to shatter a Stormtrooper’s armor.

But the android never faltered.

Each time, it regenerated and reset, adapting new weapons and fighting stances as it learned the weaknesses in her forms. It quickly began to anticipate her attacks and holding patterns, countering with increasingly complex moves, until she was the one on defense, moving fast to avoid its strikes as it drove her back across the range.

In the beginning, the Admiral watched stoically from the sideline, one arm crossed over his chest, propping the other, chin in hand. But as her savage excitement swelled, his intensity grew with it. He began to circle her, calling out corrections and criticisms and the rare word of praise, an amalgam of pride and fascination on his face as the android pushed her past her limits.

On her next attack, the droid caught her mid-leap and slammed her down to the floor. Her head cracked back against the concrete, she tasted blood as she kicked out of its grip and forced herself back on her feet. Her vision was almost double, her left shoulder listed from an earlier blow.

The drone had _wrecked_ her.

Her thighs burned, legs shaking from exhaustion. Under her breast bindings, a pair of splintered ribs dug painfully at each other. Every gulp of air felt like fire in her lungs. She was down to one chakram, the other had been knocked out of her hand, and when she tried to summon it, the android blasted it with the power cell in its palm, frying the wiring around the kyber. Her fingers in her right hand were numb, she was losing her grip fast on her remaining weapon.

Never once, since the day she picked up a light saber, had she lost to anyone in single combat, except to her father. Throughout the known universe, her ferocity was a legend. Her first day on the field in Andro-Nine, she slayed over three hundred Nemecs in an hour.

Yet now, against this single droid, she had nothing left to give.

“My lady-”

Without warning, her horizon tilted. She dropped to one knee.

“Well done.”

The Admiral was kneeling in front of her, prying her chakram from her hand. His voice, usually so stalwart and calm, shook with emotion. “Extremely well done. You were magnificent, truly. A force of nature, my darling.”

“I can’t kill it,” she whispered, swaying with a swimming sensation as the adrenaline leeched out of her limbs. She was unbearably cold.

She shook so hard her teeth chattered. “I can’t- I can’t kill it-”

“I know,” he wrapped something warm around her shoulders.

His jacket, she realized, as it drew tightly around her. It washed her in his scent.

From somewhere far up above, and yet right behind her heart, the Light sighed his name.

_Armitage. Beautiful, beautiful Armitage._

She took his face between her hands. “ _I_ can’t kill it. Don’t you get what that means?”

Tears blurred her vision. She blinked, and they ran down her cheeks into her trembling smile, stinging in the splits on her lip.

“We’re going to _win_. We are going to win-”

She turned on her knee to Sharp, gripping the Admiral’s shoulders for balance when the sudden movement spun her world. “How many of those do you have?”

“What, this old thing?” Sharp propped his elbow on its shoulder with a sly grin. “Bout ten thousand. But I can print as many as you want.”

“Ten thou-” her breath caught on a sob. She was laughing and smiling so hard it hurt. Everything, everything hurt. “How much? How many can we buy?”

“Buy? Baby, these soldiers are _yours_.” Sharp’s eyes turned soft at the corners. “Sith-tested, mother approved.”

Overwhelmed with unbelievable relief, she threw her arms around the Admiral and hid her face in his neck. Behind her closed eyes, she saw the face of her mother, smiling down at her as Discord reached up her hands.

_Thank you, Mama. Thank you. Thank you…_

“We’re going to win,” she kept saying against his skin, wet now with spit and blood and tears. She couldn’t stop laughing, and she couldn’t stop crying. “Armitage. Armitage. We’re going to win.”

He gathered her in his arms, holding her too hard and not hard enough as his hand stroked her hair.

“Yes,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

On a balcony high above the helix of Crusa, Discord tipped her face up towards the sky.

Celucea’s moon was the largest she’d ever seen, filling up the night with its round, luminous body and washing the world in cool blue light.

She closed her eyes.

Looming above and behind her, the crystal dome of Sharp Tower sparkled like a prism in the moonlight. Its kybers rang out their Light, vibrating the air with their sweet singing to the moon and stars. Her body, still warm from the healing bacta waters, swathed only in a long, dark dress, swayed softly as she bathed in their song.

“I didn’t know there was this much Light in the whole galaxy,” she whispered. Her arms stretched slowly above her head, reaching for the night.

Her belly was full of champagne and caviar, another gift from Sharp, like the guest suite sprawling behind her through the open balcony doors. After her nap inside the bacta tank, she’d bathed lavishly in cool, soap-slicked waters and emerged baptized in the knowing that everything was going to be alright. She had trusted the Admiral to restore her army, to rebuild her faith, and he had.

He absolutely had.

_Armitage. Perfect, perfect Armitage._

“You are unbelievably beautiful,” his voice lulled quietly from the railing.

She snorted, keeping her eyes closed as she tried not to smile. It was so hard, with all this feeling welling inside her.

Happiness.

“You’re thinking of my sister, Liffy.”

“No,” his timber was bewitching, licking softly at her spine and settling low inside her belly, so that she opened her eyes to see him.

He was leaning on the railing, holding the lapel of his jacket in his hand. His eyes seemed even bluer in the moonlight as they trailed slowly down her body.

“I’m thinking of you.”

A different kind of warmth rushed through her body, tingling in her breasts and in her belly as it pooled liquid and hot.

How many months had they danced around the edge of this precipice, waiting for one to shove the other into the flames? It was not in her nature to deny herself pleasure, and the ache, the physical craving for him, had reached a fever-pitch inside of her. She wanted him, he belonged to her.

She would not be denied.

Shameless, she closed her eyes and tipped her head back, following the sensations with her fingertips, touching herself everywhere his eyes and his voice made her burn. The sides of her neck, the tender skin above her breasts, her softly rounded navel, her sex…

The light behind her eyelids dimmed as his shadow crept over her, sheltering her from the moonlight. His touch replaced hers, she felt alive and electric as he transformed her definition of pleasure with his soft lips and large, hard hands.

 _Armitage,_ her Light purred and preened in his arms. _Armitage._

He kissed her deeply, spanning the breadth of her nape with his fingers to knead smooth circles into the tender sides of her neck as his tongue stroked the length of hers.

Her hands slipped over his jacket and in his hair. She pulled him closer, wanting him more, wanting him always, forever.

Dipping his head to mouth her neck, his hands gripped her ass, holding her still as he ground hard against her, his hard cock digging into the knot of excitement building low inside her belly. His hot tongue slid wet across her throat.

She whimpered, “Armitage.”

He groaned against her pulse.

With one hand, he dragged the neck of her dress past her breasts, baring her to the light of the blue moon. Her belly tightened in anticipation, breath snaring in her throat as he lowered with parted lips, so captivated she missed his fist winding softly through her hair until he pulled it, forcing her to arch sweetly into his waiting mouth.

She panted and keened.

His tongue traced her areole, he drew deeply as his hand not in her hair cupped and massaged her sex through her dress.

Her eyes rolled back and fluttered closed, eyelids flickering as she surrendered to the sensation of his tongue and of his touch. His mouth moved over the swell of her breasts, drawing her blood tingling to the surface with long, lingering sips of his lips before he drew in her other, aching nipple. She panted faster, whining and bleating where she arced quivering between his two hands.

He wrung her hair, making more of that sweet pain bloom across her scalp, at the same time his deft fingers found the cleft of her bare sex through her dress, pressing the fabric into the generous slick that dribbled for him and dragging it over her clit.

Her fingers twisted and raked through his hair as she convulsed. She cried his name.

_Armitage._

“God,” he rasped, sucking air between his teeth as he lifted his head and looked into his eyes. He looked deranged to her, insane with want, all his perfect white teeth showing between his snarl as his shook her in his fist. “You are _exquisite_.”

He kissed her before she could tell him, _So are you_ -

His kiss was furious as he roamed her body, taking whatever he wanted within his hands and squeezing until she mewled from the ache. Her arms wound around his neck, her hips stuttered against his to the wicked beat of her heart as she wrenched his hair and bit down on his lip.

Hard.

He gripped her ass and groaned.

She felt so close to coming she could scream.

“I can’t wait anymore,” his breath fell hot across her face as he covered her in damp, desperate kisses. He panted like a drowning man as his hands scrambled for purchase against her dress. “I have to have you, now.”

The fabric made a strangled, whining sound as it split over her breasts.

He bared her body to the night.

“My lady,” he breathed.

Except for the rabid rise and fall of his chest, he stood still as stone, transfixed by her body bathed in moonlight.

In that moment, watching him stare with lips parted, so openly, hopelessly devoted, so _worshipful_ , she felt like the most powerful Sith in the universe.

Drunk on it, she preened for him, raking her fingers through her long, dark hair, drawing it up above her and letting it fall slowly back onto her body. The rush when he shuddered, following the motion with his eyes like a mongrel slavering for meat in his master’s hand, was unfathomable.

With this man at her side, she would rule galaxies.

Her fingertips slid sensually over her skin, trailing cold touches so different from his hot, broad hands. She palmed one breast, swollen and sensitive from his work, and in the other, cupped her sex, shielding herself from his hungry eyes.

They narrowed, meeting hers with a dangerous glint that made her slick gush between her fingers.

“Armitage,” she whimpered, slipping through the unbelievable wetness as her lashes flickered at the sensation. She was so ready for this. For him.

She whispered, “Do you want to meet the Darkness?”

Already, he was unbuckling his belt. The leather slid with a soft hush through its loops as he told her,

“Yes.”

He lifted her in his hands and took her there, on the balcony, beneath the stars.

The first thrust of his cock inside her clutch was a quality of pain she’d never known before. She had been cut and beaten, stabbed and shot, but she’d never been split open, a small bud forced by cruelly digging fingers to bloom.

Ecstasy.

She sobbed his name into the night.

He took her without quarter, pinning her struggle with his teeth in her shoulder, hard hands bruising the tender backs of her thighs as he held her open to receive him. Over and over, he reached into the part of her that was soft and sacred, taking greedily, battering mercilessly as she arched and wailed.

When she came, she touched God.

The Force moved through her, Darkness dancing black revel around the Light, driving her higher through her pleasure. Their souls stitched together, they became one under the moonlight and the symphony of her sharp shrieks and his desperate snarls.

He took and took and took more.

And then he gave to her.

Everything.

The flood of his warmth inside her, of the life he offered, was the sweetest thing she’d ever known.

Later, they lay naked together, bodies twined in sheets and fingers laced through fingers, trading kisses in the dark.

Her fingers found the raised ridge of a scar over his heart.

“What happened?” she whispered, fingertip trembling with the aftershocks of pleasure as she traced its shape in his skin.

His lips twitched with some secret delight. “A little tiger bit me.”

“Oh no.” Her eyes met his through the dark. “Did you kill it?”

“No,” he told her with a conspiratorial smirk. He stroked her hair back over her shoulder. “I tamed it.”

He took her again, as the sun rose, softer this time. His strong, pale body flexed above hers as he whispered tender truths across her lips and against her neck. That he loved her, he’d always loved her. She was beautiful, perfect, fearsome. Whole. He would die with her, die for her.

She was the only, only one.

After, she laid on her side and stroked his chest, watching his eyes fight sleep as the tips of his finger swept the curve of her back.

“I’m going to give you worlds,” she whispered, tracing reverently his scar. Her breath trembled, her voice sounded impossibly young, even to her. But she meant every word. “I’ll take the universe, and make you my king. Everyone will worship us. We’ll have everything.” She looked into his eyes. “I’ll give you everything. I’m strong enough.”

“I know you are,” he said.

She laid down on his chest, and slept.

Tomorrow, they would go to war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I stand by my artistic choices. All of them.
> 
> (On the real though, can I just tell you, I'm kinda in love with Armitage...)
> 
>  
> 
> If you'd be so kind as to kudo and comment this bullshit, I would greatly appreciate it :)


	4. One Sith, Two Sith. Red Sith, Blue Sith.

Nineteen Years Ago

 

  

Ren woke, as he always did, at the whisper of Darkness.

 _More,_ it spoke sensuously through the haze of his sleep, so that his eyes rolled behind their lids. They flickered open to a sense of purpose.

_More power…_

He sat up, and rubbed the heel of his hand into his eyes.

Nestled into the sheets all around him, the little fruits of his Darkness slept.

Maleficence, hardly three months old, was cradled in the crook of his beloved, her small wet lips fluttering at her mother’s naked breast. Her sisters, five year old Rancora and seven year old Sybari, were curled nose-to-tail, chins on each other’s hips, wedged into their mother’s side. Their tiny brother Animus, with his peculiar preferences, slept alone at the foot of the massive bed, cocooned inside a fur throw, frowning faintly around his thumb.

_Which leaves-_

A rustle caught Ren’s attention.

From the depths of the lush duvet, two small eyes reflected back at him the low light he kept on for his wife.

The Great Dark smiled, _Hello, little shadow._

Slowly, by rote, he raised a finger to his lips. _“Shhh.”_

She mimicked the motion, smiling back at him with all her baby teeth. _“Fsssh.”_

He hooked his thumbs under her little arms and lifted her silently as he rose.

Their regime never faltered.

Each morning, they bathed side-by-side in the refresher, her tiny voice and soft cackles echoing off the glossy tiles while they washed. Tenderly, he lathered her mane, gathering it up into a pile on top of her head, then folded so she could smear shampoo through his hair and into his eyes. Her own would scrunch up against the suds until he lifted her, slick and wriggling, to rinse beneath the spray. Always, he was careful, so careful, not to crush her soft ribs or rounded belly within his overlapping grip as she shrieked and squirmed with delight.

 _“Papa, watch!”_ she chirped, sharp heels of her little feet beating against his abdomen as her legs cycled. She gargled the cool spray in her mouth and spat it out in an arc that splattered loudly against the tiles. _“Now you try!”_

After their shower, she stood next to him over the blast vent, palms planted and butt wiggling as she shook her hair. He leaned over to rake his mane dry, then helped her clamber up onto the counter by holding her hand.

They preened each other, still naked as a wolves, gleaming clean and sleek from their baths. She snickered as she combed bizarre parts into his hair, and held very still on the obsidian as he plaited hers into a single braid. Next they shaved, he with an electric razor, she by dragging the bottom of the tooth polish bottle around her chin as she hummed, _“Brrrrzzzzz…”_

Grooming complete, they dressed inside his closet.

From a thoughtful stack left by her mother in his bottom dressing drawer, a comically small pair of black tights and quilted surcoat would appear. His thick fingers worked over the hook-and eye closures of her surcoat as she studied his features, eyes solemn and breath bated while she waited for her sire to start.

In the sacred quiet of that space between hanging rows of raiment, he began, deep and sonorous.

_“Peace is a lie.”_

Her chin hiked, always, before she piped, _“There is only passion.”_

_“Through passion-”_

_“I gain strength.”_

He tugged the closures of her coat closer to make the hooks meet. Soon, she would need a bigger size.

The thought thickened his voice as he murmured, _“Through strength?”_

_“I gain power.”_

_“Through power?”_

She notched her fists on her hips and puffed out her chest. _“I gain victory.”_

 _“Through victory?”_ Mirth danced in his lightless eyes as he pulled the quilted fabric smooth over her belly. Even kneeling on one knee, he had to bend down to reach her miniscule height.

Her nose scrunched.

She cocked her chin and considered the ceiling. _“Through victory…”_

 _“My chains-”_ he started for her.

 _“My chains are broken,”_ her eyes lit as she remembered. _“The Force shall set me free.”_

 _“Very good,”_ he praised her mildly. His heart wrung when she leaned over his knee and took his face between her small hands.

Her mouth, small and moist, pressed against his. She looked into his eyes. _“May the Force be with you, Papa.”_

 _“And you, my dark.”_ Gathering her to his chest, he tucked her against his neck and smoothed her braid down her back. The feel of her little arms, soft and slight around him, was everything. _“Always with you.”_

_I would die for her._

_Yes,_ agreed the Dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now…

 

 

 

“You’re _not_ listening!”

“ _Keep_ your kriffin’ voice down,” his beloved hissed. Her headdress jingled, its gay chime out of tune with the tension in their large, lavish dining room as she whispered furiously, “Do you want to wake the babies?”

“No, I-”

“I cannot believe, you’ve been back not twenty minutes and already you’re shoutin’ the house down,” she crossed her arms under her breasts.

“Oh please,” Discord mirrored her mother’s ire exactly, right down to the bared teeth and narrowed eyes. “These walls are blast-proof, they can’t hear us-”

“Maybe I don’t want to test that theory. Can you imagine,” Rey snarled quietly, “if Animus walked in right at this moment, to _this-”_

“Prince of Darkness, Mother,” Discord threw out a hand, “You make it sound like we’re fucking each other on the dinner table-”

Rey covered her mouth and shrieked.

Discord’s head dropped back, “Ugh, such a drama-queen!”

“Hey.”

His deep murmur, like the distant rumble of thunder, made her jolt. From where he sat across the table, next to her mother, he came forward.

The only one seated, he was still a giant among them. His aura shifted around the room, black dunes of animus powerful enough to make the bulbs in the chandeliers flicker.

He set down his elbows and stacked his hands.

The candelabras rattled.

His wrath was tangible as he pinned her with a malignant stare.

“Do not,” he warned her quietly, “speak that way to your mother.”

On the other side of the table, his whelp gulped. Her fingers raked shakily through her hair as she tried, “Whatever. You’re both acting like this is a big deal and it’s not-”

“Discord.”

She cut herself off with a huff. “Sorry, Mama.”

“Not a big deal?” beside him, his beloved braced her hand on the broad shelf of his shoulder. Her fingers trembled with unhinged emotion, the fragile shrill in her voice wrung his heart. “All this time, we waited for you to come home. We _worried_ about you. We didn’t hear from you for months- we searched the galaxies and couldn’t find you. We thought something horrible had happened, that you were de-” her breath caught. She pressed the back of her hand against a sob.

He reached up and covered her hand. “Beloved-”

Her shoulders shook, the dining room filled with the soft sound of her weeping and the gentle tinkle of jewels.

Guilt softened Discord’s entreat, “Mah- _mah_ …”

Rey waved her hand, shook her head. “I-” she croaked. But she could only sob harder.

Standing stiffly at his daughter’s side, hand holding his lapel, was the genesis of his beloved’s heartbreak.

The Admiral’s chin was tilted at an imperious angle. He remained remorseless, unmoved.

 _He gloats,_ observed the Dark.

_Not for long._

“C’mon Mama, please don’t cry?” his daughter’s defensiveness had dissolved into pleading. She spread her arms, “Look, I’m right here now. Everything’s okay-”

“Everythin’s _not_ okay,” Rey’s breath hitched and shuddered. “Your father looked ev-v-erywhere for you… in every system. He didden eat, he d-didden sleep, for _months._ How could you?”

Discord raked her hair. “I told you, we lost signal. Our transponders were down-”

“No,” Rey’s hand tightened on his shoulder. She pointed, her pretty grief transformed by a glower, “You were hiding, with _him._ ”

The Admiral riased his chin.

“Your Majesty,” his tone was coolly deferential, “if I may make a clarification. Her Ladyship-” he glanced between her and Ren before he corrected, “ _Discord_ and I were traveling alone some months, yes. But we were not, as you imply, on a romantic gallivant throughout the universe. Our mission was to restore her fleet for the securement of Andromeda-Nine.” The corner of his mouth ticked upward. A gesture which was sickeningly familiar to Ren. “In which, we were highly successful.”

Ren imagined crushing that smug sneer in the span of his monstrous hand. Darkness arced over him, spreading its long, skeleton fingers towards the Admiral as his somber stare swept over him.

Their eyes met.

“Son of cur.”

The Admiral inclined his head. His gaze was as ice cold. “Sir?”

Ren drew out the silence, letting it gather like his Darkness. It hung between them like the shadow of a gallows as finally, he spoke, “If your campaign was so successful-”

He opened his hands, “where is my armada?”

“I told you,” his daughter huffed, stepping a little in front, “the Nemecs-”

Darkshear lashed suddenly and struck the floor by her feet.

She yelped and jumped.

“I’m not speaking to you, little dark,” he gestured, ignoring his wife’s soft gasp, “I am asking your _consort_ ,” he bore down on a sneer, “where are my fleet?”

The Admiral’s throat bobbed, but his gaze never wavered. “Lost in the conflict. As my wife has said, the Nemecs were numerous and resourceful. And deeply entrenched. It took our entire effort to eradicate them. Sir,” he added, a heartbeat too late to be respectful.

Ren’s gut still wrenched at the word _wife._ “I see.”

He stood.

The temperature in the room plummeted ten degrees, his titanic breadth seemed to climb forever. His Darkness rose with him, its great maw splitting open to show all its long, razoring teeth.

Like the little milk-fangs of a cornered animal, fear snapped through his daughter’s aura. She edged closer to the traitor as, next to him, his beloved tried softly to call him back to her, “Dahling-”

But he was already stepping around the table, slow footsteps rattling the chandeliers.

“Do you want to know what I think happened?” his deep murmur was mismatched with his malice, too measured and calm. His hands folded benignly in front of him.

He didn’t need them to kill this serpent harboring in his cradle.

He would tear out its heart with his teeth.

To his credit, the Admiral’s only tell was his glove clenching at his lapel. “Pray tell.”

“My theory,” Ren came closer. His Darkness was ravening. “Is that you were too distracted, fucking my _daughter-_ ”

Rey gasped, “Kylo!”

“-to command my army.” A mirthless smirk warped his scar. “Which makes you _worthless_ to me-”

“Papa, no!” Discord shouted, stepping bodily between them, “Armitage is the reason we _won-”_

Unbidden, Ren’s hand shot out.

The Force swelled through his fingertips, blue-white strikes of light snapping between them.

“Don’t,” he graveled. Lightening continued to crackle around his hand as he met her eyes. They were huge, luminous with fear. “Raise your voice to me, little girl. Do not.”

“Alright,” Rey was rushing around the table, the skirt of her long, sleek silver dress in her hand. Her voice shook. “Alright, both of you, that’s enough-”

“You don’t scare me,” his daughter whimpered, her chin tipped up towards his face. Her breath trembled, her beautiful black eyes were hard and glassine in the light.

His chest ached. “My dark-”

The fissures of Darkshear faded as he turned his palm.

He stepped closer, his heavy lumber juddering the room as the image of her strangled his heart. “He deceives you. Come away from him.”

_Come back to me._

“No,” she shook her head. Her arm, he noticed with a wrenching twist in his gut, had begun to creep behind her. “You’re wrong. He loves me. We’re in love-”

“He’s using you for your power. When he gets what he wants, he’ll betray you,” the words ground low in his throat. “Search your feelings. You know it’s true-”

“It’s too late,” her lips trembled. She blinked, and tears streaked down her cheeks like shooting stars.

He swallowed, heart breaking, as she reached behind her back.

“No, it’s not.” His lashes flickered. His eyes, he realized, were wet. The Darkness moved murmuring around him, warning him. Still, he could not withdraw his hand.

He loved her.

“Leave him, and come home,” through his grief, her face prismed, “I miss you.”

Her voice haunted him, young and small, _“There is only passion-”_

He heard the _click-burr_ of her chakram igniting a second before his wife screamed, “Discord, _no!_ ”

In the flash of red arcing laser-light, he saw the face of his father.

His hand caught and engulfed her wrist as she swung. He followed through the momentum, lifting her up off her feet.

Something hissed behind her, like the strike of a flare. It was the Admiral unsheathing his rapier, a thin band of blue laser igniting its edge as it drew along his scabbard.

Over her shoulder, Discord screeched, “Don’t!”

Ren flicked two fingers, and the Admiral tore back twenty feet into the wall.

“Let go of me!” his daughter shrieked. Her chakram blazed above her, a roaring, razoring halo for the hellcat he sired. Twisting, she kicked and scratched, “Let me go-”

He wrung his grip, rattling her until she met his eyes. “Do you have the strength to do it?”

Beside him, his wife was pulling and tugging his arm. “Both of you, stop it! Just stop!”

He ignored her, staring into the eyes of his daughter, searching for her answer as he bared his teeth. “I said, do you have the _strength_?”

Above them, her kyber guttered. Its curved hilt clattered to the floor as she sagged limp in his hand. Her breath hitched and stuttered.

“Papa!” she bleated.

His black gaze shifted to where the Admiral was struggling to pick himself back up. Ren’s mouth quirked in disgust.

The Dark sighed. _She has chosen..._

He released her.

She dropped to her knees at his feet. Her hands wrung his raiment as, beside him, his beloved clung to him and wept.

“I didn’t mean it- Papa I’m sorry! Papa, _please-_ ”

He looked at her.

“Get out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear. I'd say things can only get better from here, but...
> 
> It's a Pastel fic. We're just getting started.


	5. What Goes Up...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I just say, in every fic I could ever conceive of, Rey steals the show. That girl. That cute little Jakkuvian savage.
> 
> I adore her : >

“I cannot believe you-”

His beloved slapped her necklace onto the vanity top. Her collection of crystal perfume bottles clattered viciously on their tray. In the mirror over her shoulder, her reflection scowled at him. “We just got her back. After _three years_ , Kylo.”

She reached fuming for her earrings. Pausing with a long tear-drip adornment pinched in one hand and its backing in the other, she pinned him with a look through the glass. “An’ within the very first hour, you run her off.”

She connected the pieces and threw them into an ornate enamel bowl.

Tossing up her hands, she turned and spat, “Spectactical. Splendid. Thank you, for that.”

Where he laid stretched out on her side of the bed, shirtless, hands folded over his bare chest, with his face pointed at the dark ceiling, he murmured, “She’ll be back.”

“How do you know that?” she pleaded, palms laid open within her lap. “How can you be sure?”

“Because-” he crooked his neck to look at her directly.

Even now, like this, with the tip of her little nose and her eyes red-raw from weeping, her beauty strangled his heart.

“He doesn’t love her.”

She scoffed, a cruel, mirthless, heartbroken sound. “God, you’re unbelievably stupid.”

She propped her elbow and rubbed her eyes.

“He doesn’t,” he enunciated with teeth, “He’s using her to gain power. He’s a scheming manipulative snake, like his father.” At the thought of a Hux, pale and snide and ginger, touching one of his precious children, rage poured through his chest and flooded him like magma.

He resettled himself on the bed, trying to shake off the disturbing mental pictures as he assured her, “He won’t be able to trick her forever. She’ll see his true nature. If I have to flush it out-”

“How is this possible? That you, _you_ , of all people, are so utterly blind?”

 _Here it comes,_ above him, the Dark rolled its great, gleaming eyes, _A plea from the Light._

“The Admiral has been in love with her for _years_. The girls used to make fun of him for it. The way he’d follow her around like a lovesick porgelette,” she ticked the evidence off on her fingers, “keeping chocolates and cigarettes for her in his pockets, sparring with her endlessly, even though she has ten times his strength, takin’ her off-base on ‘is motorbike for concerts and street races, like he was her personal valet- Do you know once she dragged that poor man to a Canto nightclub? Got rippin’ drunk, started a _riot,_ then kicked off her shoes and wandered off,” she tossed up her hands. “He found her, _naked as a bluebird,_ on the beach in the water. He had to wade into the ocean fully clothed- God, I couldn’t look the General in the eye for weeks after he told me.” She clucked. “Poor old dear, he was red as his hair as he said it. Honestly, what kind of child did we raise?”

“A Sith.” His eyes had drifted shut, his violence lulled into respite by the sound of her voice. Her pillow smelled like her, floral and richly feminine. He shrugged. “It’s her universe. The rest of us are just paying rent.”

“She knew ‘e was mad for her, too. That’s why she did those things, to torment him. She wouldn’t admit it when I cornered her, but I _knew_ she could sense his feelings. We all did,” she pleaded, “I thought that’s _why_ you chose him. His devotion to her-”

“That is not devotion,” he opened his eyes and lifted his head, pointing vaguely in the direction of their ship parked in his meadow. “That is deception. He is _lying to her_.”

“Lying? Since the moment he clapped eyes on her?” she shook her head, arms arcing back over her shoulders to reach the zip of her dress. Her look might have been pitying if it wasn’t laced with so much disgust. “You’re the one’s deceivin’ himself.”

“The moment he- what?” He flipped onto his side, gut knotting at the thought. “She was sixteen. And he’s-”

He thought back to what year it was, when General Hux had announced the birth of his son.

A sick, plummeting feeling slipped through his stomach. “He’s thirty-five.”

Her eyes, softly luminous, washed over him before meeting his. Faintly, she shrugged one shoulder. The gesture pooled the neck of her dress loosely above her breasts as she murmured, “I was younger. And you were the age he is now, when we met…”

The knot twisted tighter, even as his skin prickled sensually at the memory of that long-ago meeting.

“That was different,” he murmured. His jaw clenched at the high ground shifting beneath his feet.

“Yes,” her eyes were haunting, cat-like in the near dark. He didn’t want to see what was in their lenses as she remembered, “Yes it was.”

His expression softened. “All the more reason to protect her.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she stood. Silk sighed softly over skin as her dress slipped down to her feet.

She was bare beneath it.

His heart tripped and stumbled as, slowly, she reached up and unpinned her hair. It fell soft and golden to her waist.

She lifted her chin. “I’m not sleeping with you tonight.”

He swung his feet down over the edge, touching them flat to the floor. Even sitting like he was, he was taller. And infinitely more broad.

“Oh?” he said softly.

She crossed her arms beneath her breast. Her rosy little nipples crinkled sweetly in the air. Inside the warm cocoon of light from her vanity, her skin was opalescent.

His cock began to stir, unbidden.

She jerked her chin at the door. “Out.”

His eyes narrowed.

_Little bitch._

He was about to open his mouth, to tell she had exactly one parsec to get in his bed, when down the hall, a furious wail split the night.

Rey’s eyes flashed with triumph.

_Olivia._

If his granddaughter was awake, that meant his daughter would be, too.

He was not about to chase his wife naked and shrilling, _Stop!_ in front of their children. Experience told him they would side with her, and frankly, he’d had enough Siths turn on him for one evening.

The memory of that arcing blaze of laser light juxtaposed to the distressed, crescendoing cries of a newborn wracked his heart. “Fine. Have it your way-”

She shifted, keeping well out of reach as he climbed slowly to his feet. “I’ll go where I’m wanted.”

“Let me know when you find it,” she snapped.

His jaw clenched.

She waited for him to lope midway to the door before she called at his back, “Hey, Sith.”

He turned.

A pillow was clenched in her hands. “If you drive my daughter away from me, from this family-” she leaned in and bared her teeth, “I will never speak to you again. I’ll turn all the other children against you, they’ll cast you out into a wasteland. Then nobody will love you.”

 _Insurrection abounds,_ remarked the Dark, examining its talons. _Perhaps, We grow old…_

A wry, slanted smile twisted his scar at the thought. “That’s not how it works, beloved. You know the law.”

“I don’t care about the law-”

“He cannot have her. He is not worthy.” He bore back, “I forbid it.”

She wrenched the pillow and flung it at him. “Fine, go then!”

He caught it easy, snarling, “Fuck this fucking-” under his breath as he lumbered into the hall.

She slammed the panel behind him.

Alone in the dark hallway, he paused, listening to her begin to weep on the other side of the pneumatic door, and further away, the sharp, mewling cries of his grandchild.

His nostrils flared with a sigh.

 

 

 

“Hey, you.”

His firstborn, Sybari, looked up from the baby keening in her arms.

He found her in the old nursery, dwarfed inside the mammoth recliner that had been his when she was weaning. Long nights he’d spent, while his beloved rested, lulling babes off to sleep. First his, then Maleficence’s twins after they were born. Now, life had come full circle, as he watched his first baby rock her daughter against her breast. Dressed only in a loosely-tied robe, her long dark waves were sleep-snarled. The low, shifting light inside the room accentuated the shadows beneath her half-closed eyes as tiny fingers, white and infinitesimally small, strained up to touch her cheek.

She had never looked more beautiful.

“Hey,” she gave him a wan, drowsy smile, her voice rasping but tender as she told her darkling, “Here comes the cavalry.”

Like a slow assemblé in a well-practiced ballet, she lifted the newborn from her breast with hands below neck and bottom, as he reached smoothly down to receive her. Shifting her robe, she watched him cradle his granddaughter in single span of his hand as he used the other to stroke her rounded cheek.

Tonight, the nightlight was on, a trinket he brought back for his beloved from one of his early campaigns. A moonstone glowed inside it, holding the same low, monotonous note as it burned soft and low. Its shade, made of stenciled metal, turned slowly around it. The patterns projected pictures around the room as it spun, fantastical creatures of light and shadow – lions, tigers, witches and bears. Dragons and crescent moons and stars.

The passing shapes made Sybari’s eyes seem full of a strange light as she smiled. “She’s fussy tonight.”

He looked into the pale, perfect face of his first granddaughter. No larger than a kitten inside his palm, she was red with fury, her fists jerked and spasmed with the force of her wails, eyes clenched and mouth open against the universe.

 _Enraptured,_ hummed the Dark.

“No,” he sang low, deep and sonorous. He bent his head and nuzzled her, baptizing in her cool, wet breath as he thumbed her little belly.

Just like he thought, from her face and the tone of her shrieks, she was hard and swollen.

“It’s just a little gas,” his eyebrows, like his pitch, lifted as he began to rock through her wailing. “Isn’t it, beauty?”

“Impossible,” his daughter was warbling up from the chair. Already, her eyes were shutting with her need for sleep. “She burped tw-twice-” her breath snagged on a yawn. She groaned softly into a stretch. 

His scar creased with a private, slanted smile as he began to position his granddaughter with tender ease. She felt soft and somewhat fluid, but weighty, like something innately delicate. Innately precious. He cradled her to his neck, her cries ringing in his ears as he continued to sway. “We’ll see.”

Sybari’s hands floated down to rest around his naked shoulder. She tucked her chin against his arm, smirking softly as she studied her daughter’s face. “She looks like Mama.”

The thought pricked at his eyes.

“Go to sleep, my moon,” he dropped a long kiss into her dark, mussed hair. Unbidden, he pictured her little sister huddled with her lover in a ship across his meadow.

“I love you,” he said to them both.

Sybari stroked her hand over her baby’s back, dark red nails trailing soft, soothing touch. “And I love you, my baby.”

She pressed up onto the tips of her toes, holding his shoulder for balance, and kissed the corner of his mouth. “And you, Pops.”

“Goodnight,” he murmured as his thumb began to sweep along the baby’s side.

"Night," Sybari patted his back as she left.

He listened to her shamble, down the hall back to her bed and her beloved, as he stroked and soothed his darkling in a low, soft loop, “Shh-shh-shh. Shh-shh-shh…”

On the fourth or fifth sweep, his granddaughter swelled and stiffened, then let out a wet, luscious belch against his neck.

“See, beauty?” he purred as he continued to trail his fingertips along her back. “What’d I tell you? Papa knows best."

Her breath stuttered. She gave a long, satisfied sigh and sank into his embrace.

"Papa always, always knows best…”

He settled down in the chair, swamped with hazy images of his beloved nursing their children within his lap. The baby burrowed against him, exhausted from her efforts. He swaddled her in his hand and closed his eyes, reveling in her softness and sweet, milky scent as her moist little lips pursed against his neck.

All around them, light and dark danced to the same suspended note.

He let his eyes drift shut, mesmerized by her weight in his hands, a petal set down upon the ocean. He tried to concentrate on that feeling, and not the sinister undertow pulling deep beneath the surface.

Dragons waltzed with tigers beneath the stars.

“My sweet girl,” he murmured, kissing her fist softly as sleep rose up to claim him. “My sweet, sweet girl. You’ll never leave me, will you? No… you’re my sweet girl… my sweet.. sweet…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

He dreamt about sea serpents.

Long, greedy vipers, with red eyes and white scales, sluicing fast through freezing waters.

He lifted his baby high above him as he kicked desperately towards the shore.

Their tongues lashed between poisoned fangs, they struck out against his body, rending his flesh in long, trailing tatters.

Higher and higher he lifted her. She hung naked above the water, as pale and beautiful as the moon.

One snake wound around his arm, moving faster than his Darkness to bite her.

Its name was Armitage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This a bunch of fucking shaak shit!”

A cup whizzed past and shattered on the wall to his right.

Armitage thumbed at the pounding behind his forehead.

“Hypocrite! Who the fuck does he think he is-” his lady snarled, cocking her arm for another furious throw. “Son of Darkness, please. I’ll show him the Dark Side-”

“My angel,” he called to her haggardly from the foot of the single bunk inside their lite-craft. All around his boots, broken bits of cutlery cluttered the floor. “Do calm down.”

She let out a savage sound as a plate hurled past him so quickly it blurred. The impact created a cloud of fine, white shrapnel as sharp as needles.

His eye ticked subtly as he glanced at her bare feet. _Very well then._

He stood.

She did not notice his fast, efficient stride until he was already upon her.

“Armitage,” she squeaked, clutching her next bit of ammunition – a bowl, he surmised – as he stooped to catch her about the waist with his shoulder and lifted her wholly off the floor. She wore only a long, dark tunic and her underthings, the muscles in her long legs flexed beneath his hands as she wriggled. The outside of her thick, bare thigh was cool against his neck.

He crunched over the shattered dishware to deposit her smartly on the bunk. “Forgive me-”

He knelt and pried the bowl from her hands. It made a soft clink as he laid it down on the durasteel by their bed.

_Their bed._

The thought still warmed him to the marrow.

He propped her ankles one-at-a-time over his knee, strumming his fingers over her soles to check for slivers as he told her, “But I would rather you didn't injure yourself making a point to a man who is not here to receive it.”

She supported herself with hands on the bed behind her, lips parted as she watched him. Her lashes fluttered fetchingly as she tried to gather her fury again. “He’s _wrong_. You’re not worthless, and he is not my master-”

Satisfied, he set her feet flat and took her thighs in his hands. He waited until she looked at him. “I do not disagree with you. However, I did warn you, this would be his reaction if we waited to tell them until we were married-”

“Seriously?” her face twisted, “ _I told you so_? That’s what we’re doing right now?” she shoved at his shoulders.

He did not budge. “Your father feels as if we’ve cornered him, and frankly, I cannot fault him for that. Given his complicated history with the General-”

“Frankly,” she snapped back, “I couldn’t give a fuck about _his history with the General_ ,” she mocked his accent. “I didn’t marry him, I married you.”

“That is not how your father perceives it.”

“That’s not my problem. This is my life,” she pointed, “and my Darkness. If he can’t support me, then he can go sit on the Light and rotate.”

Her teeth were bared, pale cheeks flushed with the prettiest fury.

He caught a bit of her sleek, dark hair slipping softly past her shoulder, treasuring it between his fingers as he remarked, “Delicately put.”

“So what if you’re a Hux,” she pleaded, taking his face between her hands. “I’m not his little baby anymore. I’m twenty-two.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “Aren’t you just.”

“Besides," she huffed, "Liffy was like, _ten_ when she got married to that loser pretty boy Rawdon-” she rolled her eyes.

He snorted at her ludicrous exaggeration.

“And she was preg-nant. She _had_ to marry him, Papa made her. I _wanted_ to marry you,” her lovely, lightless eyes were glassine in the glow of the cabin. They flickered back and forth between his as she cupped his neck and touched their foreheads. Her throat bobbed, he waited for her to speak with bated breath.

But still, it was impossible for her to say the words he whispered freely against her lips and into her hair as he made love to her.

_I love you._

“Perhaps,” he murmured, ignoring the rancid ache behind his ribs as he brushed back her hair, “before we storm the castle and put your dear papa’s head on a pike-”

She snickered.

Her black sense of humor never failed to charm him.

“We might sleep on the matter.” His timber turned very deep as he stroked her mane down her back. He looked meaningfully into her eyes. “Things often look different, by morning light.”

“I don’t know-” her voice was softer as her fingertips chased the rumble in his chest, “I’m still pretty wound up.” She glanced at him through her lashes. “I don’t think I can sleep...”

“I see.”

Her breath hitched and held as, slowly, he trailed down her neck, over the sweet swell of her breast, along her belly, down to her naked thigh. She parted for him, tucking her hair behind her ear as she watched him work the hem of her tunic up over her hips. Through her small dark panties, she was plump and swollen, her tight, young sex tender from how often and harshly he took her.

He couldn’t help himself. She was perfection.

Already, he sensed the slick gathering for him as softly, through the fabric, he traced her seam with his thumb.

“Might I help you with that, my lady?”

_My love._

Her lashes flickered. “Yes.”

His chin slanted. “Yes, what?”

She chewed her lip, circling her hips into his touch. “Yes, please.”

“Good girl,” he kissed her, tongue sliding slick into her cool, wet mouth.

His pretty little Sith.

“Lie down,” he told her.

 

 

 

 

 

Hours later, he sat alone in a captain’s chair inside the cockpit, nursing a cigarette. Smoke rose from its tip in a straight line to the curved view-shield in front of him. It split in two directions against the glass.

Behind the pneumatic door over his shoulder, his wife slept.

His gut roiled. He thumbed his brow and sighed.

The number series he tapped into the holo-comm he knew by heart.

His mother answered on the second beep.

Opera music floated faintly through the background, punctuated in bursts by the gentle twitter of caged finches. She was slightly off camera, shaking her long, pale hair out of the tidy pile she wore it in while she cooked. Which, if memory served him, was every second of the day.

Forgetting he could see her through the monitor, she quickly dipped to blot her lips before she sang, _“Allo?”_

Affection creased the corners of his eyes. “Ca va, Maman?”

 _“Ah, ca va bien, mon bichon_ ,” her soft, ethereal lilt lifted slightly as she recognized his voice. Smiling now, she stepped fully into view. Even through the grain of the hologram, he could tell she was meticulously made up. _“Et toi?”_

“Bien, merci.” He tilted his chin, straightening so that she could survey him with her large, amethyst-colored eyes.

His mother wasn’t precisely human, a fact which his father had received a fair amount of prejudice for over their thirty-five years of marriage. She was a Dreani, a peaceful race from a world long destroyed by the old Empire. A civilian prisoner of war at seven years old, she was taken from her family and sold into service by the former Imperial Commission. The General found her on Canto Bite early on in his military career, surviving in what he still delicately referred to as “a position of ill repute”. Her beauty was a legend within the Galaxy, as were her graces; so much so that despite his impossible moral standards and staunch religious upbringing, Armitage the third fell madly in love with her upon first glance.

After a heart wrenching affair which lasted six months, the General tried discreetly to purchase her from her master, offering an obscene amount of credits in exchange for her freedom. But her slaver refused to sell, leaving the General with just one sensible recourse: to run the monger through with his rapier and burn his brothel to the ground.

Armitage senior married Lady Amelia Hux that same evening, with soot still on the shoulders of his uniform coat, inside a small chapel aboard _The Supremacy_. Their only witnesses were his ardent love for her and Captain Gwyneth Phasma, of the ninth.

Ten months after their elopement, when she was round and glowing with his son in her belly, the General moved his wife off-ship to the officer’s base on Coruscant, where she would remain for the next three decades, raising their five children and making each successive house into the lavishly adorned, well-run homes the Admiral remembered from his childhood.

 _“Zis is a good sing zat you call now,”_ she was saying, her tone airy and light, as if he were a neighbor ringing up with a cooking question, and not her only son whom she hadn’t seen in three years. _“I was about to go into ze gardeen to give trim to the roses. Ze grow too fast zis year.”_

“I see,” he replied mildly. “What are you making for dinner tonight?”

_“Lapin wiz sauce au vin, your fahzer’s-”_

“Father’s favorite, yes,” he finished for her. It was as if he was looking back in time. That’s how little things changed around her, the nucleus of his father’s world.

 _“Oui. Zis is too rich, I try to tell to him, but does ‘e listen to what I am saying? No,”_ she sniffed.

His mouth twitched, because he knew the exact opposite to be true.

“Is Father there?” he asked.

 _“Oui, bien sur. He is in his studee. Should I call him for you now, mon bichon?”_ her dress rustled softly as she tilted towards that direction.

He inclined his head to her. “Please.”

 _“Un moment- oh, I forget to ask to you,”_ she stopped. The fingers of her right hand curled delicately under her chin with casual curiosity as she asked, _“How is la petite sauvage?”_

The lightness around the corners of his mouth faded.

“Don’t call her that,” he rebuked her quietly.

His reaction seemed to interest her. Her eyes flicked over him once as she tilted her head.

 _“Mm,”_ was all she said, before disappearing out of frame to retrieve his father.

He concentrated on the soft waves of opera and the twittering of birds, trying not to think of anything as he waited. But his gut continued to twist.

He drew on his cigarette, listening to the tobacco sizzle as it burned.

 _“Son.”_ The General stepped suddenly and briskly into view, Amelia at his side. The two were like porcelain dolls, the kind his mother collected inside her curio in the parlor, quintessential and pristine.

The sight was so familiar, yet somehow foreign and vaguely sinister as the Admiral searched for the words.

“Hello, Father. I have something to tell you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I could go on and on, literally, about these two crazy kids and their parents. I've got backstory on Armitage senior for *days*, honey. Daaaaays. The story of Hux and Amelia could be its own stand-alone.
> 
> As far as *this* fic goes, I'm think it gets pret-ty epic. Kylo Ren's not going to just sling his arm around Armie's shoulders after a good man-to-man talk and say, "Welcome to the family." That's not how this Sith rolls.
> 
> But - you tell me. Do you wanna lock in for some family drama? Or do you want your ol' pal Pastel to wrap it up and put a bow on it? I won't be offended in the *least* if it's the latter. Promise <3


	6. A Pickled Pair of Patriarchs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaysus, has it really been a month?
> 
> So sorry about that :|

Except for the mound of pillows jammed under his side of the massive duvet, Ren’s bed was empty when he slipped silently back inside the room he shared with his beloved.

Her crude approximation of his mass made him smirk. By her own sweet admission, she hated for them to be apart.

His long campaigns for glory and territory had been hard on her, especially when his children were small. She was anxious and restless, roving the castle and its grounds and staring up at the night sky in the spaces where the stars were scarcest, looking longingly into the dark.

The weeks leading up to his absences, she clung onto him, feeding him by hand and grooming him obsessively and making love to him until he was wrecked and shuddering. She rode him savagely, her smaller body moving hot and quicksilver in his lap, hands holding too-hard onto his face and in his hair as she sobbed out how much she loved him. How thankful she was for everything he’d ever given her, her clothes and her jewels and her food and her _children_. How strong and beautiful he’d made them. How if he stayed with her, she promised to be a sweeter, smarter, better wife.

It was exultingly, achingly unbearable. How she’d wring his cowl on her knees and scream for him not to go. How she taught his children to do the same.

Now, in the autumn of their marriage, he made his amends to her. Every second of the day, she felt his cold breath upon her neck.

He found her in her closet, swathed in soft, static silence, standing on a riser in front of her trifolded mirrors. She was struggling to make the clasp of her necklace meet its mate behind her nape. He stopped, obscured by rows and rows of the most luxurious gowns in the universe, and watched her.

_She is beauty._

The dress she’d chosen was undeniably his favorite, a dark, sumptuous piece shimmering with thousands of small black pearls. Its train of glimmering black pooled around the base of her riser, its length and breadth a violent contrast to fact that the gown was backless.

His dark stare raked covetously over the curling indent of her spine, to the soft slope of her hips above her backside.

He swelled with a primal, masculine pride at the way his lavish love and the bearing of his children had changed her body. Her breasts were still small and delicate, despite weaning six voracious darklings, but her belly had sweetly rounded, the skin marked and folded and silken-soft around her navel. Each of her hips was a whole handful in his monstrous grip, and her ass-

His blood rushed, heart stuttering and strangling behind his ribs as he soaked in the sight where the halves of her dress met at her seam and followed the generous, heart-shaped swoop to tops of her thick thighs.

Time should have waned her effect on him. After all the years they’d spent together, all the countless ways he’d taken her, he should have desired her less. Or another, younger beauty, altogether. But his longing for her was like a cancer, growing stronger with each passing year so that he was infected fully with the want of her, a rabid, slavering slave for her love.

She was as much his master as the Darkness, and she knew it.

He moved silently between her gowns, his breadth whispering through the drapes of fabric until at the last moment he stepped carefully through her train to materialize dangerous and titanic behind her reflection. His somber murmur disturbed the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Good morning, beloved.”

“Holy fuckin’ Force-”

She jolted, tangling in her long dress as she turned and flung her necklace. It smacked against his bare chest and slipped onto her train between them.

“Son of Darkness, Kylo,” she stamped her bare foot beneath her dress and snarled, “I _hate_ when you do that!”

Her face, he noticed, was made up with black liner and rich shadows. Her lips were painted a sensual red, dark crystals chimed where they hung like suspended tears from her hair.

_So that’s how she’s playing it…_

He stooped smirking to retrieve her necklace as she wrenched her skirt and turned back to the mirrors. She refused to meet his eyes, keeping them on her hands wringing at her waist, as he wound his thick, bare arms around her.

“Your beauty burns me,” he murmured, looming so she would feel his dark rumble as he draped her in the glistening web of diamonds. His mournful stare sought hers inside the mirror. “I missed you last night. My soul cannot rest with you beside it-”

She snorted, still studying the points where her sheer, slender sleeves looped over her thumbs and middle fingers. Even standing on her riser, the top of her elegant hairstyle did not reach his shoulder. “Save it, Sith.”

He savored her flinch as slowly, he bent to press his lips to the sliver of naked throat above her necklace. His cool whisper slipped into her ear and poured fissuring down her spine, “You have to forgive me, Rey.”

“Please,” she breathed. Her lashes flickered prettily at the touch of his cold lips to her cheek, but her chin lilted haughtily as she informed him, “ ‘less you brought back my daughter, I got nothing to say to you.”

“Hm.” He nuzzled her pile of elegant curls. His eyes closed, pulse thrumming at the sweetly disturbing memories playing across his mind. “You’re wearing that perfume, the one I brought back from Ursula-nine.”

He raised his hand and palmed her breasts. Her nipples were peaked beneath her dress. “Force, you know how crazy that one makes me-”

“Like you need a reason,” she snapped. The tips of her fingers tickled across his forearm. Beneath his hand, her captive heart fluttered.

Too quick for her to counter, he took her hips and turned her. He caught her gasp inside his mouth.

Her fingers, small and gleaming with her many jeweled rings, framed his face as his tongue slid down her throat. He kissed her tenderly, coaxing her palate with soft strokes and worrying her tongue between his lips.

_Home._

Many heartbeats later, when their mouths had peeled apart with a sensual sound, he laid his forehead on her much smaller one. His lips, wet with her kiss, lingered just above hers. He searched her big, beautiful eyes.

For that single, suspended moment, they were two lovers united in a single grief: the black bloom of their little girl into a woman.

“Kylo,” she whispered. Her lip trembled. She stroked his cheek. “Can’t you please just a’cept it? Can’t you say you’re sorry and move on?”

“I will _never_ accept him,” his eyes glinted furious in the false light, “Never.”

Her hands dropped away as she straightened. Her expression slid from mewling to fiercely devastated.

“Course you’d say that,” she spat. She bared her teeth. “There’s only ever one way with you, is there?”

His brow quirked, as something sensual and sinister sluiced through his gut. Well hadn’t this little conversation gone sideways on him.

“Oh?”

“You-” she pointed one long painted fingernail in his face, “Come sneakin’ in here with your tail tucked, blabbing about _souls resting_ and _beauty burning_ and whatever else, hoping I’ll fuck for you before the children wake up because you’re oh-so poetical,” she sneered, “Please. If you think I’d touch, you after what you did to Discord, you are totally misfortunate.”

“Oh, I see,” he nodded in dark parody. His malignant leer raked possessively over her body as he snarled, “Is that why you’re wearing your little come-fuck me dress? To punish me-”

“Fuck-me dress?” she puffed, a hot blush eclipsing her pretty outrage, “Oh my Dark Kylo, you are so delusional-”

“Cora’s commendation ceremony?” he bore down at her with vicious triumph, “That wasn’t you, Rey of Jakku, my pretty little _wife,_ leading me out to the labyrinth-”

He projected the memory at her, of the long, glimmering train of the very dress she wore tempting him to the maze of tall hedges past her reflection pool. How luminous her eyes looked, lit by moonlight as she looked back at him over the seductive curve of her shoulder.

How his blood had rushed and his gut had twisted and burned for her.

They didn’t make it to the center, he caught her where the hedges cornered and took her on her knees like a bitch under the cover of trembling stars, his big hands spread over the lush swell of her ass and her cheek pressed to the dew-soaked grass as she gasped, _Fuck me, Sith, fuck me harder-_

He gripped her now, holding hard onto her soft flesh through her dress so that she couldn’t run. Malicious satisfaction swelled against his ribs as her eyes widened at the new images he projected to her, of her pinned into the same position on a heap of scattered jewels and ripped gown, her pretty hairstyle spoiled with his fist buried in it, squealing and keening as he took her on the floor of her closet.

“Don’t be disgusting,” she spat, breasts bobbing with her quick, panicked breath. He could taste her fear-filled desire on his tongue.

“Keep it up, Rey,” one hand caught her at her nape and wrung her. She went perfectly still in his grip as he broiled, “Call me disgusting, pathetic. _Delusional.”_

He sneered, “Your pussy’s so wet I can smell it.”

She flushed the color of his saber.

“Because you’re a _dog_ ,” she seethed, shaking as she stared into his eyes, “Tell me something, _Sith-”_

He lifted his chin.

“If you’re in here getting your rocks off, who’s helping Animus down to breakfast when he wakes up?”

At the mention of his most vulnerable, challenged child, his nostrils flared. His Darkness unhinged its jaw.

“ _I bathed our son_ ,” he enunciated through gnarled, naked teeth, “while you were in here, playing with your _makeup_ , I dressed him, tied his shoes, brushed his hair, took him downstairs and fed him,” his words clanged through her closet like the pound of a gavel.

Her face, twisted in righteous anger, went slack and white.

“Oh,” she breathed.

“Yes, _oh_ ,” he mocked. His aura crackled. He was practically on top of her as he snarled, “Don’t you _ever_ throw my children in my face, Rey-”

“Okay, alright, you’re right,” her hands juddered against his chest. She tried to backpedal. “You’re so right, I’m sorry. It was wrong of me and I’m sorry-”

But his blood was pounding in his hands fisting in her dress and in her hair, his heart beat like war drum against his chest. “I am not some bastard smuggler or filthy fucking worthless drunk who sells his own flesh and blood-”

Images rushed past him, too fast and slithering for him to catch, of his daughter, naked and arching in the coils of a treacherous snake, of a little girl left alone inside a vast desert, of his father falling off the walkway into the heart of a nuclear reactor, of his sweet small girl pretending to shave with him from her perch on the countertop.

His voice stretched and cracked, “I am not a bad father-”

“Course you’re not, no one’s saying that,” she spoke in a trembling hush. It had been years, so many he couldn’t exactly count, since she looked at him this way. Well and truly afraid. “But dahling you have to calm down-”

Suddenly, the refresher outside her closet was filled with the staccato of stampeding mice-feet. An identical pair of shrieks echoed shrilly off the tile.

“Moh-moh! Mee-meeeee!”

In a moment of wild confusion, he and his beloved froze.

Then she gasped, “The boys-”

His twin grandsons, Seath and Magnus.

With the strength of a ten suns, he caught the tail end of his control and throttled back his Darkness.

She sagged with relief when he released her. “Rey-”

“Just don’t,” she blew out a long, shaky breath and smoothed her hairstyle. It was hopelessly mangled in the back. “Don’t say anything-”

The small, piping babbles were almost upon them.

He could not swallow around his guilt as he turned and knelt to meet his grandsons.

They were given to him by his fourth and youngest daughter, Maleficence, and they stunningly beautiful.

With their mother’s fragile, elegant features and their father’s jet hair and cold grey eyes, the firstborn, whom Ren called Mad Magnus, was a feckless wildling prone to intense bouts of affection and biting the hand that fed him. Seath, his younger brother by four minutes, had a ruthless, calculating nature and was deathly allergic to sitting still. He was savagely possessive of Ren, snapping his tiny milk-teeth and pinching his fingers like crab-claws at anyone who came close to him, including his own mother.

More feral, glorious grandchildren there were not.

They flung themselves into his arms, their soft little bellies colliding with his solid mass as they squirmed and scrabbled to hang off his neck. Each babe was small enough to fit his head entirely inside Ren’s mouth, yet both were fearless of their mammoth grandsire. They pawed at his face with tiny, soft-tipped fingers and wrung his mane as they reveled, “Dah-bah Moh-moh, Moh-moh da-bah-moh!”

“Oh yes I see,” he murmured assuringly, cupping them carefully as he turned to kiss each of them on their small, moist mouths. Their lashes, lush and dark like their mother’s, fluttered and curled against their rounded cheeks.

His Darkness settled back on its haunches and closed its fangs.

_We are still loved._

He felt along their bottoms and frowned.

Neither his daughter nor her breeder had tended to their soiled swaddling.

“What is it?” Rey had untangled her train and stepped down from the riser. Her face, slightly mussed from his mauling, appeared over his shoulder. She looked only at the children as she spoke, “Was wrong?”

At the sight of their grandmother, the boys swelled with ecstasy. “Me-me!”

“Hello, my lovies,” she sang. Her smile, though faintly tremulous, was not false. She radiated love as she covered their faces with loud, shrill smacks of her lips right next to his ear.

He told her too low for them to hear, “Liffy didn’t change them.”

“Of course she didn’t,” her airy lilt turned icy.

The sweet scent of her perfume lingered on his shoulder when she straightened. She came around them, dragging the smooth, cool beading of her gown along his arm as she went. “She’s selfish and ‘pulsive and thinks only of herself.”

 _Like her father_ , her tone said.

Without so much as a glance at him, she leaned down beaming and offered her hands to the two beautiful darklings in his lap. “Alright then, dovies. Which of you wants a patty-cake for breakfast?”

“Pat-cay, pat-cay!” the boys whooped and flailed as they clambered.

“That’s right. Mimi’s going to give you fresh bummies, then we’ll go have our patty-cakes.”

Magnus snatched her fingers in both his hands and tipped all the way back to beam at her. But Seath held only her pinky as he reached back for Ren.

His tiny fingers crooked in a gesture he’d seen his grandsire make a hundred times. “Moh pat-cay. Pat-cay, Moh-moh.”

“Momo cannot have a patty-cake,” she told him. She spared Ren a brief glare as she informed the boys, “He’s on a time-out. For bein’ rude to Aunt Cordi and for scarin’ poor Mimi.”

As Seath’s eyes turned large and glossy, Magnus flapped his whole hand and chided, “Bad Moh-moh!”

Ren gave her a mournful look.

 “Yes, very bad Momo,” she agreed, hitching Magnus up onto her hip then dipping to catch Seath’s whole hand. Tears of sympathy dripped down his little cheeks as she started to lead him away. “Come on, lovie, quick as a beetle now. Momo needs to stay in this closet and think about what he’s done.”

She shot him one last glower as she rounded the corner. “He can come out and play when he ‘pologizes. To everyone.”

Seath’s wave trailed sadly behind him.

Alone amongst lavish gowns and adornments, Ren sat back on his heels, stunned.

 

 

 

 

 

In a sumptuous, soft-lit parlor on another world, a woman more beautiful than starlight fell to the rug at her husband’s feet.

“Amrie,” she bleated pitifully. The silk bustling of her long, rose-colored gown rustled over the gentle crackle of the hearth. She wrung the tail of his officer’s jacket and beseeched him with every fiber of her being, “Amrie, _please_ … You must _do somesing_ -”

He took her soft, slender hands, so pale they were striking even against his own, and knelt before her.

Amelia Hux was usually such a stoic creature, soft-spoken and remote. She shared his grave disdain for grandiose displays of emotion, believing as he did that they belied a weakness of character. He had never seen her like this, unhinged with desperate fright. Recalling her circumstance when they met, it seemed remarkable, until he considered her history with the Siths.

In that light, her reaction was unsettlingly apropos.

“Now now, kitten,” he soothed. His blue eyes that burned cold for all the universe turned infinitely tender on her. “You mustn’t carry like this, you’ll make yourself sick-”

“Zhat monster has my baby,” she sobbed stuttering into his chest. Terror wracked her body, she clutched his lapels and shuddered in violent starts. “Zhey will kill him, zhey will kill my son. Mon enfant…”

He stroked her long, soft hair, falling white as snow in loose, elegant curls to her waist. “They’ll do nothing of the sort. This has all been some sort of… misunderstanding. Ren cannot know his daughter has-” he couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

_Married._

“- made an alliance with our son. If he did, he would have annulled it by now. He knows a union of our households is not to be born. It would be an aberration.”

Even as he spoke, a slick, sinking feeling slipped through his gut. It settled dark and heavy in his core, a fearful sense of foreboding that sought to drag him into despair.

He simply refused to surrender. “I shall go Mustafar and petition the Sith. He will see this is an egregious error and abrogate this… _liaison_ at once. You’ll see. Everything will be set to right.”

Her arms wound tightly around his neck. She keened into his collar.

He held her as strongly as he dared, his solid arms wrapped carefully around her delicate waist. She had always felt slight and feminine in his embrace, a sensation he cherished. But now, as she wept and shivered in a way he’d never seen before, it was as if she was blown from glass. He had a horrible sense she would shatter at any moment, and he would be lost forever.

“Shh-shh, mon petite chaton,” he whispered as he rocked, “You’ll see, Papa will set it all to right. Shh-shh-shh…”

Gently, very gently, he took her shoulders so he could look into her face. Her pale cheeks were flushed with the force of her grief, her eyes, so large and pleading, shone like wet amethyst in the light of the fire. Tears fell like shooting stars over her cheeks, they dripped and trailed down the swell of her breasts.

Even in fear, she was a vision.

With the side of his finger, he tipped up her chin. “Amelia, my love. My angel. Please don’t carry on this way. It’s breaking my heart.”

Her breath shuddered. She swallowed, trying very hard to stem back her tears. “Ah-Amrie-”

“I’m here,” he cupped her face in his hands.

The very face that had shined up at him every day for the past thirty-five years, as a seedling seeks through spring’s cruel frost to find the sun.

Never had he failed her.

He did not intend to start now.

“Papa is right here, my love,” briefly, sweetly, he bent to touch his nose to hers. Her lashes fluttered softly, shedding more tears into his palms. “And I give you my word, I will not abandon our son to those demons. Not now. Not ever. This union ends now.”

“Papa,” she whispered reverently. The tips of her little fingers stroked prayerfully along his collar.

He kissed her.

She melted into him, winding her slender arms around his neck and parting her lips to sigh stutteringly into his mouth.

He sought the secrets hidden behind her tongue, his thumbs strumming at her cheeks as he savored the saltiness of her tears. Her full breasts crushed softly against his chest, he bathed in scents of her sweet-smelling hand cream and warm, rich cooking, and of the roses in her garden, blooming lush and fragrant under her tender care. From the piano room, the peaceful twitter of her finches inside their gilded cages mingled with the low, soothing snap-crack of the hearth.

Finally, their lips parted with a soft, sensual sound.

Her face glowed in the sifting blush of the fire, strange-colored eyes refracting the light like a prism.

He held his whole universe between his hands.

“I will leave tonight,” he stood to make preparations for his ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ren's not the only one having *none* of this shit.
> 
> Hux Senior is on the warpath.

**Author's Note:**

> For less camp and more virulent Sith-oscity, check out my serious work, A Violent Heart: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14266785/chapters/32905572


End file.
